Joyce Carol Oates
Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.Collection: Art
I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.Collection: Causes
These are the moments for which we live.Collection: Moments
Exotic: meaning you're "desired." For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.Collection: Sexy
. . . 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.Collection: Powerful
I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.Collection: Art
For politics is in its essence as Adams had said, the 'systematic organization of hatred': either you were organized or you were not.Collection: Essence
You cultivate the subconscious by meditation, by sitting in silence and by not trying to control your thoughts. Then go someplace where you haven't been before, or go for a walk, a run, and look for signs of grace-an epiphany, something that comes to you.Collection: Running
The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.Collection: War
I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?Collection: Space
Acting is the loneliest profession I know.Collection: Acting
On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.Collection: Writing
Boxing is rough. Even if you win, you get hurt.Collection: Sports
Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.Collection: Sex
Insomniac is an impassioned work-an inspired amalgam of academic and first-hand research, memoir, analysis, and the kind of obsessive brooding we associate with the insomniac state. Much here is fascinating, and much is upsetting; here is a cri de coeur from a lifetime insomniac that is sure to appeal to the vast army of fellow insomniacs the world over.Collection: Army
Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.Collection: Remember Something
I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.Collection: America
the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.Collection: Church Service
Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.Collection: Writing
For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.Collection: Revenge
Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general: Keep trying, don't give up, don't be discouraged, don't pay attention to detractors. Everyone knows this.Collection: Giving Up
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.Collection: Long Ago
Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.Collection: Consistency
Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.Collection: Mind
All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.Collection: Actors
Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.Collection: Art
The regional voice is the universal voice.Collection: Voice
The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one's generosity? Why regret one's impulsiveness, one's misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you'd written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don't cherish us as we'd cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them.Collection: Regret
The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.Collection: Suicide
A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.Collection: Life Is
A daydreamer is prepared for most things.Collection: Prepared
I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' - and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.Collection: Strong
And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.Collection: Mother
Though I am never exactly "blocked" I do have difficult periods. I am led by a fascination with material - the challenge of presenting it in an original and engaging way. I have no problem imagining stories, characters, distinctive settings & themes - but the difficulty is choosing a voice & a language in which to present it.Collection: Character
Characters begin as voices, then gain presence by being viewed in others' eyes. Characters define one another in dramatic contexts. It is often very exciting, when characters meet - out of their encounters, unanticipated stories can spring.Collection: Spring
Before I undertake a lengthy project, I have usually given much thought to it over a period of years. My files are filled with likely subjects - which perhaps, one day, I will develop.Collection: Years
For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.Collection: Invisible
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! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?Collection: Eye
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.Collection: Running
You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.Collection: Morning
Only when men are connected to large, universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity.Collection: Creativity
There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.Collection: Opportunity
A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.Collection: Men
I think what distresses me most in my life is that I have so many ideas I consider exciting ideas that I will never live to execute because it takes me so long to execute.Collection: Thinking
Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough.Collection: Punishment
Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.Collection: Art
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.Collection: Art
The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.Collection: Writing
The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.Collection: Writing