Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

These are the moments for which we live.

But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.

From Mother you will inherit the belief that you can journey to your fate, there's a place to be located on a map that's destiny. If only you can get there. If it isn't too late. If no one stops you.

That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.

Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

Why should I want what's good for me?' Beatrice asked him, smiling. 'Is that what you want for yourself - only what's good for you?

I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?

It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.

And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a good mother in the world's eyes or a bad mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

Our great American philosopher William James has said - We have as many personalities as there are people who know us. To which I would add We have no personalities unless there are people who know us. Unless there are people we hope to convince that we deserve to exist.

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.

What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.

Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted? If it were not for language, could we lie?

Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.

A female is essentially a cunt, the pure purpose of the female is cunt, but a woman, a wife, is a cunt with a mouth, a man has to reckon with. It's a sobering fact: you start off with a cunt, you wind up with mouth. You wind up with your widow-to-be.

Yet there was something gratifyingly real about being called a bitch, a whore, a blond tramp. Where so much was a dreamy haze, anything promising to be real was bracing.

You can't deny Eros. Eros wills trike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the 'perfect obliteration of blood consciousness.

Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.

Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.

All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.

Know what 'celebrity' is kid? Being paid to bullshit the rest of your natural life.