Joyce Carol Oates People Quotations

Like most people, I can be very easily hurt.

When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it.

like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth ...

An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.

...[I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone...Well, that fact alone is staggering.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.

My students often say, 'My roommate read this story and really liked it,' and it's hard to convince them that there are things wrong with it. I say, 'Well, people who love you want you to be happy. But I'm your professor and I'm supposed to be teaching you something.'

People who are disenfranchised politically and people who are poor often don't vote. They often don't elect politicians, so the politicians who are supporting them are really being very charitable, because they're not going to give them billions of dollars in campaign funds.

Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very beautiful and elevated thoughts and some measure of dignity. I didn't have that experience at all. I had one pratfall after another.

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.

Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.

The quiet people just do their work.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.

But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.