Quotes By Author: Joyce Carol Oates

“For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.”

“I’m drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.”

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

“The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It’s technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day–a way of relating.”

“It isn’t the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.”

“If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?”

“Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger’s life”

“For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination’s caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.”

“When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.”

“I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”

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

“. . . 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.”

“And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo – that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.”

“If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.”

“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”