This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash. - Joyce Carol Oates
If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly true in the case of professors or intellectuals, who are full of fascinating information, but need encouragement before they'll divulge it. - Joyce Carol Oates
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. - Joyce Carol Oates
. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful. - Joyce Carol Oates
We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it. - Joyce Carol Oates
It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort. - Joyce Carol Oates
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. - Joyce Carol Oates
Warum man schreibt, ist eine Frage die sich der Schriftsteller, völlig versunken in seine Arbeit, nicht stellt. Theorien sind das Gebiet derer, die nicht handeln. - Joyce Carol Oates
A daydreamer is prepared for most things. - Joyce Carol Oates
The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love. - Joyce Carol Oates
Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life - Joyce Carol Oates
Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst. - Joyce Carol Oates
In love there are things --- bodies and words. - Joyce Carol Oates
In love there are two things - bodies and words. - Joyce Carol Oates
Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart. - Joyce Carol Oates
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. - Joyce Carol Oates
I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. - Joyce Carol Oates
Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art. - Joyce Carol Oates
How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty? - Joyce Carol Oates
For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power. - Joyce Carol Oates
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food? - Joyce Carol Oates
The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives. - Joyce Carol Oates
Only where there is life can there be home. - Joyce Carol Oates
The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day--a way of relating. - Joyce Carol Oates
You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source. - Joyce Carol Oates
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul. - Joyce Carol Oates