Joyce Carol Oates

“I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.”

“The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn't want to put restraints on "robber barons"-he might become one one day!”

“A hero can be fool, he's still a hero.”

“The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.”

“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?”

“Las masas se venden por un salario, los capitalistas son unos hijos de puta que te seccionan la yugular, recogen tu sangre en frascos y la venden al mejor postor, la religión es el opio de las masas y las iglesias son empresas capitalistas organizadas para hacer dinero y asegurarse poder e influencia. Por supuesto, las leyes favorecen a los ricos y a los poderosos, el poder sólo desea engendrar más poder de la misma manera que el capiral sólo quiere engendrar más capital.”

“Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!”

“The Bog Kingdom. Bidding him enter! Ah, enter! There, all wishes are fulfilled. The more forbidden, the more delicious.”

“For isn't the artist by nature a revolutionary?”

“A man may accommodate himself to a disagreeable situation in a few months. The intolerable may take a little longer.”

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

“... while madness in individuals is relatively rare, it is virtually a prerequisite for a certain sort of political leader.”

“It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power.”

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

“And we can read - there is always the prospect of escape, through books.""Books are not a means of 'escape', Meta! Books are a means of knowledge, and of learning how to cope with the future.”

“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.”

“I always instruct my students to write a great deal. Write a journal. Take notes. Write when you are feeling wretched, when your mind is about to break down...who knows what will float up to the surface? I am an unashamed believer in the magical powers of dreams; dreams enhance us. Even nightmares may be marketable -- there is something to be said for the conscious, calculating exorcism of nightmares, if they give to us such works as those of Dostoyevsky, Celine,and Kafka. So the most important thing is to write, and to write nearly every day, in sickness and in health. In a while, in a few weeks or a few years, you can always make sense of that jumble of impressions...or perhaps it will suddenly reveal its sense to you.”

“I tell my students to write of their true subjects. How will they know when they are writing of their true subjects? By the ease with which they write. By their reluctance to stop writing. By the headachy, even guilty, joyous sensation of having done something that must be done, having confessed emotions thought unconfessable, having said what had seemed should remain unsaid. If writing is difficult, stop writing. Begin again with another subject. The true subject writes itself, it cannot be silenced. Give shape to your dreams, your day-dreams, cultivate your day-dreams and their secret meanings will come out.”

“Alone,alone! It is a fact, you hear more acutely and you see and think most acutely,when you are alone.Alone, alone! But there is happiness in alone, if you believe you have chosen it.”

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

“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.”

“I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called “culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.”

“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.”

“Remembering backward is the easy thing. If you could remember forward, you could save yourself...”

“لا يمكنني التورط مع رجل لا يهمه أمري وأمر طفلتي وحياتنا معًا، أكثر من اهتمامه بغريب ... لا يمكنني التورط مع رجل لا يهمه إن عاش أو مات! يرمي بحياته مثل الزهر وكأن لا قيمة لها”

“Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.”

“It’s up to the writer and the artist to give voice to these people. There are two impulses in art: one is rebellious and transgressive—you explore regions in which you are not wanted, and you will be punished for that. But the other is a way of sympathy—evoking sympathy for people who may be different from us—whom we don’t know. Art is a way of breaking down the barriers between people—these two seemingly antithetical impulses toward rebellion and toward sympathy come together in art.”

“I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes.”

“These were no-man's-lands, limbos of a sort, places where language did not prevail and the only protection was flight, if you could run fast enough; or submission if you couldn't.”

“Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?”

“Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.”

“You ordinary people who read and do not write, who 'like to read' and know nothing of the sufferings of writers, how fortunate you are!”

“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.”

“Our great American philosopher William James has said - "We have as many personalities as there are people who know us." To which I would add "We have no personalities unless there are people who know us. Unless there are people we hope to convince that we deserve to exist.”

“Because I am in love. Love is a slow bleed.”

“It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.”

“The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.”

“This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.”

“The distinction between "assistant" and intern" is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.”

“I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedlessly one might say-or 'fearlessly'- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though I may have had, since adolescence, a kind of intellectual/literary precocity, I had not experienced much;nor would I experience much until I was well into middle age-the illnesses and deaths of my parents, this unexpected death of my husband. We play at paste till qualified for pearl says Emily Dickinson. Playing at paste is much of our early lives. And then, with the violence of a door slammed shut by wind rushing through a house, life catches up with us.”

“The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.”

“... her Quaker instincts led her to apologize for wrongs not her own to minimize conflict.”

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

“The gym cat appears to those who will die. He is our totem." This thought came to me a few weeks ago. I shared it with no one of course.”

“You don't have to understand why anything that has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.”

“Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.”

“Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.”

“The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.”

“For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?”

“Legally I am a ‘widow’ — that is the box I must check. But beyond that — I am not sure that I ­exist.”