Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.

Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

This is a work of history in fictional form—that is, in personal perspective, which is the only kind of history that exists.

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.

Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.

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.

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.

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.

As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

I never change, I simply become more myself.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

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

Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.

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

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.

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.