Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

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.

I'm drawn to failure. I feel that I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.

In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.

When writing goes painfully, when it's hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.

Why you can't trust women. Even young girls. Can't know what the fuck they are thinking, can't know what they are feeling, can't know how they will surprise you except to know it won't be a surprise you will like.

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.

I love insult, it's always honest.

Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident.

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.

One man's insanity is another man's genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb.

A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?

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

Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.

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.

I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint. For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you've done it you can't say clearly if that was what you'd wanted or just something that happened to you, like weather.

Time is the element in which we exist... We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.

Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.