816 Quotes by 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 by page, resembles our technique of living day by day--a way of relating.

I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

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 felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

In marriage, one plus one is more than the sum of two. But sometimes in a marriage, one plus one is less than the sum of two.

There is something female about being dead.