Joyce Carol Oates

Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive. There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Dominique (who, like other Cat amount girls, had a cache of pills for every occasion) offered me a Bennie- Benzedrine?- to elevate my spirits. Adamantly I told her, No, thanks! I wanted to face what's called reality with my eyes open. I've made that a principle for my life. Sometimes I wonder if this has been a wise decision.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Dorcas wasn't a fast walker. It was difficult for me to keep behind her. I tried to let others, joggers, and bicyclists, come between us. I followed her past a field where girls were playing soccer, and into the woods bordering Cat amount Creek. The smell of pine needles underfoot was sharp, pungent. I seemed to know that I would always associate that smell with this afternoon, and with Dorcas.

— Joyce Carol Oates

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.

— Joyce Carol Oates

For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don’t have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year’s season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact, it might be argued that the Christmas-New year’s season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the pre-season of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existential point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our Maddie’s robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummies’s frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: “Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you

— Joyce Carol Oates

For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don’t have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year’s season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact, it might be argued that the Christmas-New year’s season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the pre-season of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existential point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our Maddie’s robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummies’s frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: “Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you”.

— Joyce Carol Oates

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

— Joyce Carol Oates