Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the… — 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
The other book that I worry no one reads anymore is James Joyce's Ulysses. It's not easy, but every page is wonderful… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can't live… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The greatest works of literature seem to embody both "art" and "morality". — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I have read on a Kindle. But the Kindle we had only worked for about eight months then it stopped working. You… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Except that awards are competitive, which is a negative thing, they are wonderful for singling out deserving individuals and bringing their work… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“A woman who has lost her husband is invalid, thus an invalid. In” — 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 Image
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 Image
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
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 Image
At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
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 Image
The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
'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 Image
