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

Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He wa...

Joyce Carol Oates

I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break for many hours - and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.

Joyce Carol Oates

My own way of writing is very meditated and, despite my reputation, rather slow-moving. So I do spend a good deal of time contemplating endings. The final ending is usually arrived at simply by intuition.

Joyce Carol Oates

As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

Joyce Carol Oates

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...

Joyce Carol Oates

Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls; for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy.

Joyce Carol Oates

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, incl...

Joyce Carol Oates

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

Joyce Carol Oates

One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates

I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and 'the life of the mind' - and now, such subjects have become my...

Joyce Carol Oates

To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.

Joyce Carol Oates

My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated.

Joyce Carol Oates

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates

My students often say, 'My roommate read this story and really liked it,' and it's hard to convince them that there are things wrong with it. I say, 'Well, people who love you want you to be happy. But I'm your professor and I'm supposed to be teachi...

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates

Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.

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