Quotes By Joyce Carol Oates

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

I can't say I was a very successful sorority girl.

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

A lot of widows feel that they have betrayed their spouse by continuing to live. It's deranged thinking. I know that, but that doesn't stop you feeling it.

Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.

Love is an indescribable sensation - perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.

I have read on a Kindle. But the Kindle we had only worked for about eight months then it stopped working. You don't have to get books repaired.

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.

When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.

I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.

After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.

If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.

I consider tragedy the highest form of art.

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

I really love to set things in places that are real to me.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.