I don't know whether I am different from other people. Perhaps I am. Perhaps no one has a personality, and people are… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't… — 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
The American dream is a multi-metaphor made up of distinct regions. Many regions of this country are almost like different countries. Even… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
America is a very religious nation. Not a mono-religious nation because there are many different strands of belief, but there's something about… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were… — 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
