“But thinking it my duty to stretch the flayed skin of my childhood on some sort of skeleton of convention” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child. — 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
Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child,… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational… — 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
The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people.… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to… — 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
'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human beings, and that it is particularly powerful in children unless it… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“It was Corinne’s secret belief that her daughter was a far finer person than she was herself, a riddle put to her… — 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
