816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

On the Decker bus she often gave up her seat to older passengers or to women with young children, she was nervously alert to the needs or near-needs of other people. It pleased and excited her to see the space she’d occupied taken, the emptiness where she had been so readily filled in.

Never can you climb over this wall, you’re not strong enough; girls aren’t strong enough; girls aren’t big enough; your body is fragile and breakable, like a doll; your body is a doll; your body is for others to admire and to pet; your body is to be used by others, not used by you; your body is a luscious fruit for others to bite into and to savor; your body is for others, not for you.

I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It’s like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don’t find it easy.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it’s not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms – they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I’m surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter – it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.

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.

It’s very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation – but, then I couldn’t be myself either.

I would suggest the widow do things the husband used to do, so he seems to be there with you. You will feel like just going to bed. It’s so wonderful, going to bed.

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, touch, stare into one another’s faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn’t happen.