816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

You who are non-believers rely upon us, to confirm your sense of superiority. You need to imagine us as unchanged, unchangeable.

Food doesn’t exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.

We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

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

It was hard not to exude the air of a martyr, if one did just slightly more than the other, as it seemed Mickey frequently did.

The challenge is, to live in a house from which meaning has departed, like air leaking from a balloon. A slow leak, yet lethal. And one day, the balloon is flat: it is not a balloon any longer. By.

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.

A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons – Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy.

He thinks: He could give up. He could admit defeat. But he will not admit defeat. He is still alive.