Joyce Carol Oates quotes - page 4

I'm drawn to failure. I feel like I'm contending with it constantly in my own life. (Joyce Carol Oates)
I would suggest the widow do things the husband used to do, so he seems to be there with you. You will feel like just going to bed. It's so wonderful, going to bed. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Any number of definitions help to determine who we are. It doesn't hurt to be a woman writer, an American woman writer, American woman writer of the 21st century. I think all these descriptions of us - and they're descriptions and adjectives that pertain to you - none of them diminish you, really. I think that maybe there's a kind of deepening or expansion the more identifications you have. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Exotic: meaning you're "desired." For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out? View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
I love insult, it's always honest. (Joyce Carol Oates)
If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly true in the case of professors or intellectuals, who are full of fascinating information, but need encouragement before they'll divulge it. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Which is why we saymeaning. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Prose - it might be speculated - is discourse; poetry ellipsis. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
I think that art is the commemoration of life in its variety. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
We all have numerous identities that shift with circumstances. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
We work in the dark-we do what we can-we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it. (Joyce Carol Oates)
I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. View quote
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. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates