See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Know what 'celebrity' is kid? Being paid to bullshit the rest of your natural life.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“No way of life so entrenched will ever 'wither away' - it must be helped, with dynamite, if need be.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Our lives are Mobius strips, misery and wonder simultaneously. Our destinies are infinite, and infinitely recurring.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“You can think of your life as the mistakes you made that catch up with you finally.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I'm drawn to failure. I feel like I'm contending with it constantly in my own life. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“She had no existence, in herself. From earliest childhood she had believed this. Rather she was a reflecting surface, reflecting others' perception… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Knowing now I would never be alone again never lonely again as in those years God allowed me to be thus as… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing-for one of those bouts that go on and on, round… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
She thought that this man was her savior, that he had come to her at a time in her life when her… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I think what distresses me most in my life is that I have so many ideas I consider exciting ideas that I… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories,… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls; for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Of course, a literary work is a kind of nest: an elaborately and painstakingly woven nest of words incorporating chunks and fragments… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“I would know of myself through the witnessing and naming of others. As Jesus in the Gospels is only seen and spoken… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
“Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
