Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

And he'd died because that life had mattered to him.

No baby ever saved anybody's life that I ever heard

They said, Tell us. She said, Only what I know. They said, Tell us, so that justice can be executed. She said, I was drinking. I was to blame. I don't remember. How can I give testimony against him!

She didn't return to school until the first Monday in March. By that time she'd thought, thought long and hard, much of the time in solitude in her room, and healed herself. Of course, she kept up with her school assignments; she was diligent, even obsessive about that.

And had rarely thought about since.) It was ridiculous to stand here, so astonished, so slow-witted, so perversely vulnerable . . . yet what other attitude was appropriate, what other attitude would not violate the queer sense of the sacred, the otherworldly, that the house had evoked?

Boys and girls, always remember: Jesus loves you, when no one else does!"—this was a typical remark of Mrs. S——'s, called out to us gaily, as if it was happy news and not hurtful.

One day, Mom removed the soiled, torn prom dress from the hack of Marianne's closet where it was hidden. She hadn't needed to ask Marianne where the dress was. Found it, unerring, without wishing to examine it; wadded it into a ball and stuffed it in a paper bag with other household trash. Mom's eyes gleaming with tears, but she wasn't crying, nor was Marianne. Not a word uttered.

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

Only when men are connected to large, universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity.

A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.

It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.

Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.

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

"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

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

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

And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.

Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.

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

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.