'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the 'self' see the 'self' with any objectivity? — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I haven't the faintest idea what my royalties are. I haven't the faintest idea how many copies of books sold, or how… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The punishment – to the body, the brain, the spirit – a man must endure to become even a moderately good boxer… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I think what distresses me most in my life is that I have so many ideas I consider exciting ideas that I… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a… — 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
