Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

About Joyce Carol Oates:

Joyce Carol Oates is an American author. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over forty novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, and the National Humanities Medal. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), Blonde (2000), and short story collections The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A fear of the unknown: what was that called? Worse yet: a fear of the known.

Joyce Carol Oates

I have no inner life. I have no ‘intimate’ life. I am just what I-what to do. I move from one habitation to another like one of those-is it herit crabs? Taking up residence in others shells. (…) Others’ shells are fine. You come, and then you...

Joyce Carol Oates

And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it’s inaudible.

Joyce Carol Oates

I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many ‘culturally-mandated’ differences. In First World countries we’ve evolved beyond mere biology -it isn’t the fate of the human female to ...

Joyce Carol Oates

Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive. There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

Joyce Carol Oates

The gym cat appears to those who will die. He is our totem." This thought came to me a few weeks ago. I shared it with no one of course.

Joyce Carol Oates

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

Joyce Carol Oates

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

Joyce Carol Oates

-So you don't believe we have souls I guess?" and Legs laughed and said, "Yeah probably we do but why's that mean we're gonna last forever? Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?

Joyce Carol Oates

A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?

Joyce Carol Oates

Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave...

Joyce Carol Oates

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

Joyce Carol Oates

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

Joyce Carol Oates

Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral...

Joyce Carol Oates

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

Joyce Carol Oates

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.

Joyce Carol Oates

The distinction between "assistant" and intern" is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not. But of course interns are paid, in experience.

Joyce Carol Oates

Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For what's 'morality' but a leash around the neck? A noose? What's 'morality' but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purp...

Joyce Carol Oates

I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.

Joyce Carol Oates

For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.

Joyce Carol Oates

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.

Joyce Carol Oates

Author Bio

  • NameJoyce Carol Oates
  • DescriptionAmerican author
  • BornJune 16, 1938
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPlaywright; Poet; Novelist; Essayist; Autobiographer; Writer
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; National Humanities Medal; National Book Award; Humanist Of The Year