Joyce Carol Oates
Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb.Collection: Dumb
Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.Collection: Spite
I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint. For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you've done it you can't say clearly if that was what you'd wanted or just something that happened to you, like weather.Collection: Weather
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.Collection: Country
For the first time driving that day I could feel the motion of the Earth. The Earth rushing through the emptiness of space. Spinning on its axis but they say you don't feel it, you can't experience it. But to feel it is to be scared and happy at once and to know that nothing matters but that you do what you want to do and what you do you are. And I knew I was moving into the future. There is not PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or ever to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.Collection: Moving
Writing is the most solitary of arts.Collection: Art
Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.Collection: Loyalty
There are boxers possessed of such remarkable intuition, such uncanny prescience, one would think they were somehow recalling their fights, not fighting them as we watch.Collection: Sports
Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.Collection: Past
Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies.Collection: Book
Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.Collection: Stories
But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.Collection: Moving
Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.Collection: Memories
I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.Collection: Believe
Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.Collection: Suicidal
Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.Collection: Girl
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.Collection: Reading
Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think of what it might be.Collection: Running
I don’t read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I’m also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.Collection: Reading
Yes, I’ve listened to just a few audiobooks – but hope to listen to more. I’ve wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.Collection: Reading
My writing is often a way of ‘bearing witness’ for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won’t be affected too much by my personal life.Collection: Stories
Novels usually evolve out of ‘character.’ Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.Collection: Stories
At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There’s something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.Collection: Country