Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie? — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is… — 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 would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
If Shakespeare's great plays are variants of stories, even novels, you can see how each character is telling his story from his… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut is not… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The joyous fulfillment of your sex : the sacred duties of beloved wife, and helpmeet, and mother. In opposition to the vulgar… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and… — 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
