Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

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

“In love there are two things - bodies and words. ”

“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”

“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.”

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

“And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident ...”

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

“A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?”

“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.”

“See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be”

“. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.”

“But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touc...”

“Death is just the last scene of the last act.”

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

“I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.”

“If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?”

“Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she f...”

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