Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

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.

And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your self.

The distinction between "assistant" and intern" is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.

But of course interns are paid, in experience.

Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest.

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

. . . 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.

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.

For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?

Living's immediacy, you go full sail, you're in a fever of motion. Until it's safe and past and done and dead and you can say, like waking from a dream, "Yes I was happy then, yes now it's all over I can see I was happy then." Maybe that's the advantage of dying?

Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

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