"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

"I never change, I simply become more myself."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
"
— Joyce Carol Oates

"In love there are two things - bodies and words. "
— Joyce Carol Oates

"Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"The best revenge is living well without you. "
— Joyce Carol Oates

"Every scar in my face is worth it."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless)

"The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang)

"Which is why we say I can't live without you meaning your life gives life to me, who am otherwise an empty vessel, nameless."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless)

"Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
"
— Joyce Carol Oates (The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982)

""Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed."
— Joyce Carol Oates (The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982)

"A daydreamer is prepared for most things."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been. "
— Joyce Carol Oates (I Am No One You Know: Stories)

"you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Small Avalanches and Other Stories)

"I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it. "
— Joyce Carol Oates (Zombie)

"Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless)

"The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct"
— Joyce Carol Oates (Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang)

"You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter. "
— Joyce Carol Oates (I Am No One You Know: Stories)

"I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end. "
— Joyce Carol Oates (I Am No One You Know: Stories)

"“We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.”"
— Joyce Carol Oates

"If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?"
— Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless: Tales of Transgression)

"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."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Wild Nights!: New Stories)

"There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Wild Nights!: New Stories)

"If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything."
— Joyce Carol Oates (First Love)

"Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive. "
— Joyce Carol Oates

"I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless)

"It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Black Water)

"I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing-for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible to see your opponent is you …"
— Joyce Carol Oates (On Boxing)

"Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless)

"Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless)

""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""
— Joyce Carol Oates (After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away)

"She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Black Water)

"We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves,
unable to see that here, now,
this very moment is sacred;
but once it’s gone –
its value is incontestable."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"Taking the law into your own hands, fuck what's wrong with that?"
— Joyce Carol Oates (Rape : A Love Story)

""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

"A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Black Water)

"Knowing now I would never be alone again never lonely again as in those years God allowed me to be thus as if He did not exist forcing onto me the bitter knowledge that He did not exist in truth or if He did His existence touched in no way upon my own."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"....whatever you do, with whom you do it or whether you do it alone, and when, and how, and why, to what mysterious end—it's balanced against nothing, against Death and forgetting. You balanced against oblivion."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"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."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"None of the rest of my life figures here. "
— Joyce Carol Oates (I Am No One You Know: Stories)

"Loretta folded her arms. She felt like a heroine in a movie, confronted by a jealous husband in a kitchen while outside the camera is aching to draw back and show a wonderland of adventures waiting for her—long, frantic rides on trains, landscapes of wounded soldiers, a lovely white desert across which a camel caravan draped voluptuously in veils moves slowly with a kind of mincing melancholy, the steamy jungles of India opening before British officers in white, young officers, the mysteries of English drawing-rooms cracking before the quick, humorless smirk of a wise young woman from America. . . ."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love. "
— Joyce Carol Oates (I Am No One You Know: Stories)

"'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?'"
— Joyce Carol Oates (Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Selected Early Stories)

"The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt."
— Joyce Carol Oates (The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982)