Joyce Carol Oates Mean Quotations

My parents were very proud of me. After they passed, my career doesn't mean as much to me.

To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

I don't feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it's so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor would mean staring at a screen for too many hours.

Art is a means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least temporarily, the ravages of homesickness. To speak of 'what is past, or passing or to come'-in the most meticulous language thereby to assure its permanence; to honor those we've loved and learned from and must outlive.

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.

What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.