Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

Much in our lives is chance.

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

Tragedy is the highest form of art.

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.

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.

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

My writing is full of lives I might have led.

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

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

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.

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

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

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

There is nothing "ordinary" about reality.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

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