For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very… — 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
I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The joyous fulfillment of your sex : the sacred duties of beloved wife, and helpmeet, and mother. In opposition to the vulgar… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I see the world in ways that might be considered somewhat harsh and Darwinistic. At the same time mediated, as in Darwin,… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Art is a means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Insomniac is an impassioned work-an inspired amalgam of academic and first-hand research, memoir, analysis, and the kind of obsessive brooding we associate… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world… — 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
