Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

Be daring, take on anything. Don't labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

Since thirteen, she'd been preparing. She wasn't beautiful like these Bayhead Harbor girls, but it was surprising how men sometimes looked at her. More it was older men rather than guys her age, for some reason. […] There were guys - older guys - she'd yearned for so frankly you could see it in her face.

The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.

There are some secrets so toxic you can't share. Especially if you love who it is you'd have to share with.

Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For what's 'morality' but a leash around the neck? A noose? What's 'morality' but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purposes?

HUSBAND: Is something wrong? BETHIE: Why--why do you ask? HUSBAND: You looked so lonely, suddenly. As if you'd forgotten I'm here.

That glass sliver in the heart. Amid a fluttery-delicious Benzedrine rush, virtually every remark made to you is freighted with destiny, a sweet-painful stab in the heart. And Benzedrine and champagne, what a combination! The Blond Actress was only just discovering what everybody else in Hollywood knew.

Men grow cold as girls grow old And we all lose our charms in the end. How prettily Lorelei Lee sang these mordant lyrics!

I've never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.

Never can you climb over this wall, you're not strong enough; girls aren't strong enough; girls aren't big enough; your body is fragile and breakable, like a doll; your body is a doll; your body is for others to admire and to pet; your body is to be used by others, not used by you; your body is a luscious fruit for others to bite into and to savor; your body is for others, not for you.

Then the noise faded and Legs squinted up at the sky, the moon so bright you'd never think it could be merely rock like the earth's common rock and lifeless, merely reflected light from an invisible sun and not a powerful living light of its own...

Like a turnip such a head could be blown away very easily. For where a man was weak, a woman has unmanned him. It would be a mercy to blow such a man away.

I believe in uttering the truth, even if it hurts. Particularly if it hurts.

An adult man possesses the power to enter your soul. A boy has no power, The power to hurt, maybe, but not the power to enter your soul

I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.

Relief is happiness for those who, otherwise, would have no happiness.

I don't want anything from you but the fact of you.

the hopeful young author had no doubt that books might change the world.

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

No way of life so entrenched will ever 'wither away' - it must be helped, with dynamite, if need be.

For isn't the artist by nature a revolutionary?

The fundamental truth of my life whether in fact it was truth or a burlesque of truth: when a man wants you, you're safe.

It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.

No American sport or activity has been so consistently and so passionately under attack as boxing, for moral as we'll as other reasons. And no American sport evokes so ambivalent a response in its defenders: when asked the familiar question How can you watch . . . ? the boxing aficionado really has no answer. He can talk about boxing only with others like himself.