Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

You were one person alive and your brain was encased in a skull. There were other people out there. It took effort to be connected.

All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

As a writer, I'm always mindful that not everyone is going to feel the same way I do about something, so my emotions are just my emotions.

People are people, and they want to know about their own experiences.

What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.

I write human stories. I write about people. Not as a product of their environment. But from the stance that everybody is made of the same thing.

As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.

I don't know what other people are like, I haven't been able to crawl inside anybody else.

Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.

The forms of my awareness are richer than yours.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

When you're close to somebody, you can never really know how they're experiencing the world.

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

We're so complex; we're mysteries to ourselves; we're difficult to each other. And then storytelling reminds us we're all the same.

We all have our own takes on things. To being yourself. The abstract, the whole thing that I play with, seems to result in seeing through your lenses, and once you express how you see things to others, you start to see there are similarities between all people. It's kind of like, no matter how far you go, you're still where you started, in a way.

Things that feel super personal actually feel really universal. It's sort of the more you really identify something specific within yourself, the more people connect to it because ultimately we are all connected in some way.

Although it is difficult to pinpoint the physical base or location of awareness, it is perhaps the most precious thing concealed within our brains. And it is something that the individual alone can feel and experience. Each of us cherishes it highly, yet it is private.

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.

You believe that you live in the world, where in fact the world lives within you.

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.

As you are, so is the world.

You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their experience.

By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.

We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.