816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.

For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.

Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.

The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!

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.

They were astronomers plotting the trajectories of stars.

Messes are made by people who want but don't know what they want, let alone how to get it.

; so too, her glazed ceramics and her macramé are interchangeable with those executed by her women friends in the area, who take courses at the Mill Brook Valley Arts Co-op and whose houses are gradually filling with their creations, like ships gradually sinking beneath the weight of ever-more cargo.

For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.