Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.
Joyce Carol Oates
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Lockport
New York
Believe
Philosopher
Things
Dead
Taught
Alive
Sensation
Sleep
Exquisite
State
Sweetest
Born
Sensations
States
Greek
More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
I don't know what marriages are like in general, but there are many things which I don't talk about with my husband. We discuss practical problems, but I wouldn't sit down with him and talk about the distant past. It's somewhat in contrast to other Americans, who feel that they have to confess things, but I'm really not like that.
Joyce Carol Oates
Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.
Joyce Carol Oates
No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.
Joyce Carol Oates
A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?
Joyce Carol Oates
I never change, I simply become more myself.
Joyce Carol Oates
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.
Joyce Carol Oates
Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.
Joyce Carol Oates
All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.
Joyce Carol Oates
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.
Joyce Carol Oates
In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.
Joyce Carol Oates
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
Joyce Carol Oates
The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.
Joyce Carol Oates
Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.
Joyce Carol Oates
Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.
Joyce Carol Oates
I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself.
Joyce Carol Oates
Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?
Joyce Carol Oates
I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?
Joyce Carol Oates
Not even the most devastating truth can be told it must be evoked.
Joyce Carol Oates
I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so much more calming than my husband.
Joyce Carol Oates
