The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control… — 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
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
Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book,… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
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
It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance,… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow… — 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
For the first time driving that day I could feel the motion of the Earth. The Earth rushing through the emptiness of… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor. — 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
