Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say, ‘Thou art no Poet may’st not tell thy dreams?’ Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved And been well nurtured in his mother tongue. Whether the dream now purpos’d to rehearse Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

And so while dreams are the individual man's play with reality, the sculptor's art is (in a broader sense) the play with dreams.

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.

What's poetry? It's not real but maybe it's more than real. It's dreaming while you're awake.

A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology.

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.

The arts open your heart and mind to possibilities that are limitless. They are pathways that touch upon our brains and emotions and bring sustenance to imagination. Human beings' greatest form of communication, they walk in tandem with science and play, and best describe what it is to be human.

The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.

A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.

ART, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape as "One day a wag - what would the wretch be at? Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT, And said it was a god's name! . . ."

Art like life is an open secret.

I dream in fire but work in clay.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

Without art there is no hope.

We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth.

What is art? It is not just nature, it is nurtured nature. It is intelligence applied to what physical ability you have.

Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.