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

The most common misperception about me is that I write fast. I just write often. Every hour that I can.

Joyce Carol Oates

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet...

Joyce Carol Oates

People who are disenfranchised politically and people who are poor often don't vote. They often don't elect politicians, so the politicians who are supporting them are really being very charitable, because they're not going to give them billions of d...

Joyce Carol Oates

I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself.

Joyce Carol Oates

Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

Joyce Carol Oates

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.

Joyce Carol Oates

Like most people, I can be very easily hurt.

Joyce Carol Oates

I am concerned with only one thing, the moral and social conditions of my generation.

Joyce Carol Oates

I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates

My parents were very proud of me. After they passed, my career doesn't mean as much to me.

Joyce Carol Oates

Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.

Joyce Carol Oates

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

Joyce Carol Oates

I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.

Joyce Carol Oates

It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.

Joyce Carol Oates

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

Joyce Carol Oates

I don't know what marriages are like in general, but there are many things which I don't talk about with my husband. We discuss practical problems, but I wouldn't sit down with him and talk about the distant past. It's somewhat in contrast to other A...

Joyce Carol Oates

This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.

Joyce Carol Oates

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

Joyce Carol Oates

You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't h...

Joyce Carol Oates

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

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