Quotes By Joyce Carol Oates

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.

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

As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.

If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line; frequently these days, while on the phone having been 'put on hold.'

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.

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

A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.

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.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

I can't say I was a very successful sorority girl.

Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.

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

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

A lot of widows feel that they have betrayed their spouse by continuing to live. It's deranged thinking. I know that, but that doesn't stop you feeling it.

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

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

Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

Love is an indescribable sensation - perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.

What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.