Joyce Carol Oates Quotes - Page 6

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.

I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love.

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.

For politics is in its essence as Adams had said, the 'systematic organization of hatred': either you were organized or you were not.

Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

Acting is the loneliest profession I know.

On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.

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.

Boxing is rough. Even if you win, you get hurt.

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.

Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.

After love a formal feeling comes.

... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.

Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing.

And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.

Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked.

You can't deny Eros. Eros wills trike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the 'perfect obliteration of blood consciousness.

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.

Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.

God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.