Life Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.

— Joyce Carol Oates

The great happiness in life in creativity belongs to amateurs.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.

— Joyce Carol Oates

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

— Joyce Carol Oates

None of the rest of my life figures here.

— Joyce Carol Oates

“My crappy-kid's life. It was mostly a shitty life wasn't it, OK but I miss it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.

— Joyce Carol Oates

One of life's minor satisfactions is forgetting.

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

"Because there has been no one to stop me" has been one of the principles of my life.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I tend to think in dramatic terms. In life, there may be an actual drama, but it would be the fictionalized, imagined…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real…

— Joyce Carol Oates

“Which is why we say I can't live without you meaning your life gives life to me, who am otherwise an empty…

— Joyce Carol Oates

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth…

— Joyce Carol Oates

I always tell my students the same thing. And that's to live life, and to read very voraciously without any definite program.…

— Joyce Carol Oates

To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved.…

— Joyce Carol Oates

I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as…

— Joyce Carol Oates

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it…

— Joyce Carol Oates

“She would become, through the years, a woman who expected the worst, to relieve herself of the anxiety of hope. She would…

— Joyce Carol Oates

“There could be no romance in the terrible possibility that Gretel Nissenbaum had fled on foot, alone, not to her family but…

— Joyce Carol Oates

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page…

— Joyce Carol Oates

I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing--for one of those bouts that go on and on, round…

— Joyce Carol Oates

When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the…

— Joyce Carol Oates

“The fact was that the woman lived the life she chose, she was happy in that life and it was no one's…

— 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…

— 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…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

— Joyce Carol Oates

A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.

— Joyce Carol Oates

“So they'd fucked up her life, those guys she'd trusted, for fun. What the hell.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

There is something thrilling in the mimesis of life's surprising unfolding.

— Joyce Carol Oates

“Only where there is life can there be home.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

“I am snatching at things to prove my life.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

“Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in…

— Joyce Carol Oates

“A dog’s life is a speeded-up version of your own. After a while, you can hardly bear to be a witness.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man's deepest passion.

— Joyce Carol Oates