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
Characters begin as voices, then gain presence by being viewed in others' eyes. Characters define one another in dramatic contexts. It is… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions,… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother. — 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
