Joyce Carol Oates Quotes, Thoughts and Images

It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

There is nothing "ordinary" about reality.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self.

I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

My writing is full of lives I might have led.

Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.

The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming.

If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.

Tragedy is the highest form of art.

Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.

Much in our lives is chance.