816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

I’d like to be your friend – but only if you promise not to ever, ever count on me.

Detroit, my ‘great’ subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am – for better or worse.

She will speculate that she didn’t fully know her husband – this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband “alive” in her memory – elusive, teasing.

I think we are all cats with nine lives, or even more. We must rejoice in our elusive catness.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a “logical consistency,” or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

It struck her to the heart, left her weak, disoriented, that, to Michael Mulvaney, after all, his family wasn’t quite enough.

It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own.

That’s how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.

Novels usually evolve out of ‘character.’ Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.