816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

I really love to set things in places that are real to me.

My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.

For the first time driving that day I could feel the motion of the Earth. The Earth rushing through the emptiness of space. Spinning on its axis but they say you don't feel it, you can't experience it. But to feel it is to be scared and happy at once and to know that nothing matters but that you do what you want to do and what you do you are. And I knew I was moving into the future. There is not PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or ever to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.

Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible [to me] voice, unexpectedly.

I have read on a Kindle. But the Kindle we had only worked for about eight months then it stopped working. You don't have to get books repaired.

Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.

To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.