Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

I've never, ever labeled myself.

I don't think anybody's quite accurately branded me. I'm not sure I could do it myself.

Defining yourself by your taste is easier than defining yourself by any genuine stance on something.

There's nothing harder than defining oneself.

Who am I, really? I prefer to leave that up to the observer, because I will never finish answering that.

There are a lot of people who don't know me and what I am all about.

It's hard for me to label myself or characterize myself.

I couldn't put into a capsule one thing that represents me, I don't think.

Nobody else can tell you what you are.

I've never thought of myself in terms of an identity. I'm always baffled when I encounter someone who gives the impression about being confident about a particular defined identity.

I think we identify ourselves by labels or things that we are able to do: I am this. I am a good cook. I am a good mother. I am a good this. I am a good doctor. I am a good lawyer. When you can’t do those things anymore, you wonder where your identity is.

I don't really do anything that isn't about writing, and I don't really know who I am if I'm not thinking about writing.

We wear a lot of labels in our lives, and it's so very easy to be defined by them. We have grown somehow accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a size eight or a size fourteen, as a capricorn or a taurus, as single or in love.

I've got an age that I do think of myself.

Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.

I'm not always what I think I am, but I am what I think.

We live our lives based on who we think we are.

But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

Even you, who’ve lived inside your body for 64 years, would apparently be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to think of your ear or one of your eyes or elbow, also familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

In a way, you kind of get caught up in whatever image of yourself you think is out there.

Am I a 'woman of action'? I don't think of myself that way.

The actor has a constant problem of personal identity.

For myself, I do not now know in any concrete human terms wherein my individuality consists. In my present human form of consciousness I simply cannot tell.

If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.

I think I am one of those who can manage not to take on a completely different appearance under their own glance.