Joyce Carol Oates
The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.Collection: Writing
It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.Collection: Principles
She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.Collection: Ifs
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.Collection: Art
Yet the fact had no consciousness of itself except through me.Collection: Facts
Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of "artists.Collection: Art
One man's insanity is another man's genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.Collection: Men
Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.Collection: Food
We are the species that clamors to be lied to.Collection: Lied
Ambitious, absorbing, and poignantly moving.Collection: Moving
She thought that this man was her savior, that he had come to her at a time in her life when her life demanded completion, an end, a permanent fixing of all that was troubled and shifting and deadly. And yet it was absurd to think this. No person could save another. So she drew back from him and released him.Collection: Broken Heart
I am always reading or thinking about reading.Collection: Reading
The punishment – to the body, the brain, the spirit – a man must endure to become even a moderately good boxer is inconceivable to most of us whose idea of personal risk is largely ego-related or emotional.Collection: Men
Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive.Collection: Death
To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man's deepest passion.Collection: Passion
I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love I love I love I love but you do not.Collection: Breakup
How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.Collection: Children
The best revenge is living well without you.Collection: Revenge
Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.Collection: Sight
Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.Collection: Loneliness
Tragedy is the highest form of art.Collection: Art
The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.Collection: Struggle
My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.Collection: Art
What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Encouragement
I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.Collection: Block
Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields - and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible.Collection: Communication
The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.Collection: Reality
It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.Collection: Feel Good
Much in our lives is chance.Collection: Chance
Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.Collection: Our Love
Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.Collection: Eye
We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable.Collection: Gone
Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.Collection: Ideas
Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.Collection: Eye
I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.Collection: Freedom
Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.Collection: Time
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
It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole.Collection: Book
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.Collection: Might
A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible.Collection: Sharks
Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.Collection: Party
In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.Collection: Noise
For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?Collection: Pain
Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.Collection: Facts
This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.Collection: Phones
celebrate while you canCollection: Celebrate
Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.Collection: Language
Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.Collection: Love Is