The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
"Because there has been no one to stop me" has been one of the principles of my life. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Better to be despised, then, than to be ignored; or damned with condescending praise. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“There are people, primarily women!--who are what I call 'conduits of emotion.' In their company, the half dead can come alive. They… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing. — 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
I'm drawn to failure. I feel that I'm contending with it constantly in my own life. — 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
