Joyce Carol Oates
My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.Collection: Character
I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love.Collection: Thinking
God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.Collection: Blessing
When a marriage ends, who is left to understand it?Collection: Ends
Whoever was stupid was beneath worry or thought; you did not have to figure them out. This eliminated hundreds of people. In this life you had time only for a certain amount of thinking, and there was no need to waste any of it on people who were not threatening.Collection: Stupid
What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.Collection: Memories
Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.Collection: Having Patience
None of the rest of my life figures here.Collection: Figures
Budapest in late May is a city of lilacs. The sweet, languid, rather sleepy smell of lilacs wafts everywhere. And it is a city of lovers, many of them quite middle-aged. Walking with their arms around each other, embracing and kissing on park benches. A sensuousness very much bound up (it seems to me) with the heady ubiquitous smell of lilacs.Collection: Sweet
Art originates in play - in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy; it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release.Collection: Art
Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?Collection: Experience
In families there are frequently matters of which no one speaks, nor even alludes. There are no words for these matters. As the binding skeleton beneath the flesh is never acknowledged by us and, when at last it defines itself, is after all an obscenity.Collection: Family
It's rare that we actively and consciously 'forget'; most of the time we have simply forgotten, with no consciousness of having forgotten. In individuals, the phenomenon is called 'denial'; in entire cultures and nations, it's usually called 'history.Collection: History
Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice.Collection: Art
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
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.Collection: Communication
The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.Collection: Ignorant
The great happiness in life in creativity belongs to amateurs.Collection: Creativity
Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?Collection: Belief
Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.Collection: Lying
A diverse and lively collection, the highest art of the interview.Collection: Art
Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless the blood rushes out happily in the warm water as if kin to it, the same tender substance. Rising a new person transformed with an icy sense of error I go to the sink and turn on cold water which is not friendly to blood. The cut is deeper than imagined.Collection: Suicide
Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.Collection: Light
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.Collection: Writing
The joyous fulfillment of your sex : the sacred duties of beloved wife, and helpmeet, and mother. In opposition to the vulgar and mercantile hurly-burly of the great world, the idyllic pleasures of the domestic hearth-the which, I firmly believe, make of one small room an everywhere, indeed; and provide us with that small measure of bliss, which is, if we are greatly fortunate, and deserving, Our Lord's promise to us, of the Heaven to come.Collection: Mother
America is a very religious nation. Not a mono-religious nation because there are many different strands of belief, but there's something about this nation that inspires people, or perhaps draws people, who are strongly idealistic.Collection: Religious
I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing--for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.Collection: Life
Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.Collection: Passion
Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.Collection: Dream
In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolvedCollection: Sports
How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?Collection: Doe
Alone, she took hot baths and sat exhausted in the steaming water, wondering at her perpetual exhaustion. All that winter she noticed the limp, languid weight of her arms, her veins bulging slightly with the pressure of her extreme weariness ... one day in January she drew a razor blade lightly across the inside of her arm, near the elbow, to see what would happen.Collection: Winter
To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.Collection: Ocean
To claim - to claim repeatedly - that you are innocent of what it is claimed by others that you have done, or might have done, or are in some quarters strongly suspected of having done, is never enough unless others, numerous others, will say it for you.Collection: Done
It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.Collection: Secret
I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.Collection: Hard Work
I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.Collection: Art
Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.Collection: Writing
Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.Collection: Art
I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.Collection: Book
I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be a teacher, since I so admired many of my teachers. And though I loved writing, I did not ever think of myself as a writer.Collection: Girl
Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce.Collection: Virginia
I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction.Collection: Play
It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.Collection: Writing
I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.Collection: Art
Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.Collection: Writing
The greatest works of literature seem to embody both "art" and "morality".Collection: Art
We come away from the tragedies of [William] Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form - yet the art-work is elaborately artificial, the very genre of tragedy in poetry an anti-naturalist perspective.Collection: Art
It is important for me to discover the ideal title, for without this title the story or novel isn't quite in focus.Collection: Focus