Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

I never change, I simply become more myself.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

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.

It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.

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.

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

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder. It's not the best way to build a ladder, but I don't know any other way.

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

There is nothing "ordinary" about reality.

Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.

Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self.

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

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.

while there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity.

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.