Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty

The best revenge is living well without you.

A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible.

One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

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

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

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.

Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?

What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.

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

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.

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

When poets write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

In love there are two things -- bodies and words.