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Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

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Famous Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

“Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.”

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Book:Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates
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“'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.”

ChildrenWarYoungSocialPoorRaceClassNovelTerribleConsequenceHatredSlaveWorkersInjusticeCivil WarTragicImmigrantsDivisionFactoriesExploitationMillsYoung ChildrenAftermathSocial InjusticeImmigrant Workers
Author:Joyce Carol Oates
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“'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.”

ThinkingWayHeartChildrenFactsMy OwnNovelNew YorkParticularMy HeartCatIncludingPassingPassingsClosestValentineAmerican LifeGirlhoodMuffinsUpstate New York
Author:Joyce Carol Oates
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“When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the lies of certain individuals close to me, with the detachment of time. I wanted to tell the truth about secrets: How much pain they give, yet how much relief, even happiness we may feel when at last the motive for secrecy has passed.”

GivingFeelsLooksMayEnoughWantedPainLastsLyingCertainIndividualMy OwnSecretMotiveReliefTelling The TruthFamily LifeSecrecyDetachment
Author:Joyce Carol Oates
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“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.”

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Author:Joyce Carol Oates
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“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.”

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Book:Heat and other stories
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“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.”

IfsMenPersonsBodyMightTogetherChoicesSexAnimalArmsCurrentsLegsSmellReleaseRanBreastsSentimentsSweatLockedElectricBellyLeaving MeDrowningCompulsionBoltsFrenzyClutchArms And LegsHim And HerElectric CurrentDon't Leave Me
Author:Joyce Carol Oates
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