Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

My parents were very proud of me. After they passed, my career doesn't mean as much to me.

People who are disenfranchised politically and people who are poor often don't vote. They often don't elect politicians, so the politicians who are supporting them are really being very charitable, because they're not going to give them billions of dollars in campaign funds.

Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.

For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.

Erotic: meaning you're desired. For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.

Which is why we say I can't live without you meaning your life gives life to me, who am otherwise an empty vessel, nameless.

Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and the connection must be there? Like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth, simultaneously?

How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you.

It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.

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

The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.

What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.

I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

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.

I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.

Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.

The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct

For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.

Taking the law into your own hands, fuck what's wrong with that?

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

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.