Latest Joyce Carol Oates Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Beautiful, Writing, Looks

  Source: www.achievement.org

• I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  America, People, Landscape

  Source: www.achievement.org

• I always tell my students the same thing. And that's to live life, and to read very voraciously without any definite program. To travel, to meet people, to talk to people, to listen very carefully, and not interrupt, but listen to their own grandparents speak of their families.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Live Life, Grandparent, People

  Source: www.achievement.org

• America is a very religious nation. Not a mono-religious nation because there are many different strands of belief, but there's something about this nation that inspires people, or perhaps draws people, who are strongly idealistic.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Religious, America, People

  Source: www.achievement.org

• The American dream is a multi-metaphor made up of distinct regions. Many regions of this country are almost like different countries. Even in one state, northern and southern California are like two separate countries.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Dream, Country, Two

  Source: www.achievement.org

• Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Ideas, Perfection, Idealism

  Source: www.achievement.org

• In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of medium by which something is transmitted.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  May, Stories, Kind

  Source: www.achievement.org

• My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Solitary Life, Care, Life Is

  Source: www.achievement.org

• I don't know whether I am different from other people. Perhaps I am. Perhaps no one has a personality, and people are inventing themselves in the context in which they find themselves.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  People, Personality, Different

• It's hard to say how we compare to other people. We each inhabit our own personalities. I have often felt that I'm a very neutral being and that I have almost no personality. I'm drawn to writing partly because I'm fascinated by the mimetic process.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, People, Personality

  Source: www.achievement.org

• When one crosses over from an activity, or the verb, of writing or doing, and becomes a noun, like "a writer" I think that is an act of supreme self-consciousness that I've never, in effect, made. I write, but I don't like to think of myself as a writer. I think it's somewhat self-aggrandizing and pretentious. Now, I am a teacher.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Teacher, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.achievement.org

• Henry David Thoreau is very independent-minded, very iconoclastic, and had quite a corrosive sense of humor. I think that I probably have grown up to have a Thoreauvian perspective on many things. Though in other ways I live a life he would not have approved of. He believed to simplify, simplify, simplify. Make your life very clear and plain and meditative and not confused. Sometimes my life, in fact, is confused.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Confused, Independent, Thinking

  "America's Foremost Woman of Letters". American Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

• I think what distresses me most in my life is that I have so many ideas I consider exciting ideas that I will never live to execute because it takes me so long to execute.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Thinking, Ideas, Long

  Source: www.achievement.org

• By the way of connecting with subject, with theme, I was able to find a kind of lifeline. Writing's like a lifeline. You have to get the right way in. Otherwise the material just lies there, and you can't do anything with it.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Lying, Writing, Able

• I turn down invitations to do things for money. I have almost no interest in making money. Actually, I've acquired a fair amount of money that I will never live to spend. So earning money, in a way, depresses me, because I feel it's just piling up.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Depressing, Way, Earning

  "America's Foremost Woman of Letters". American Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

• I've never given up. I've always kept going. I don't feel that I could afford to give up. That would be the beginning of the end.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Giving Up, Would Be, Given

  Source: www.achievement.org

• I see the world in ways that might be considered somewhat harsh and Darwinistic. At the same time mediated, as in Darwin, by a real idealism and an excitement about the possibilities of the intellect and imagination to deal with this somewhat brutal world.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Real, Imagination, World

  Source: www.achievement.org

• I've always been so interested in personal history. I'm very fascinated by my parents' and my grandparents' generations. I seem to think that they had a resilience and an integrity that may be somewhat deficient in my own generation, and in subsequent generations as well, because America has been rather easy to live in since the Depression.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Integrity, Thinking, America

  Source: www.achievement.org

• My parents inspired me by their example. They both grew up in the Depression, and both of them had to quit school when they were quite young to work, because there actually was no choice. So they've always impressed me with their resilience, their good spirits, their courage. I just remember them carrying on and just doing their lives. They really made a strong impression on me.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Strong, School, Parent

  "America's Foremost Woman of Letters". American Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

• That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Reading, Yield, Inspired

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• I am more or less reading all the time.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Reading

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Voice, Sometimes, Irresistible

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• These novels [Zombie, My Sister, My Love] are so special to me. [I don't expect that they will have nearly the same significance to anyone else.] They represent a kind of fiction I would love to pursue more or less constantly, but dare not.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Zombie, Special, Fiction

• If Shakespeare's great plays are variants of stories, even novels, you can see how each character is telling his story from his perspective; each is vying with the others for dominance, but in the end, in tragedy, most of these voices will die, to be replaced by the yet more vigorous voice of a younger generation.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Character, Play, Voice

  "Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. September 10, 2016.

• Shakespeare would seem to have been a person for whom the human voice/personality in all its splendid idiosyncrasy was absolutely enthralling.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Voice, Personality, Splendid

  "Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. September 10, 2016.