I've never given up. I've always kept going. I don't feel that I could afford to give up. That would be the… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him 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
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
I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
People who are disenfranchised politically and people who are poor often don't vote. They often don't elect politicians, so the politicians who… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general:… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the… — 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
