Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Though I am never exactly "blocked" I do have difficult periods. I am led by a fascination with material - the challenge… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite… — 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
Art is a means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories,… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into… — 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
