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
I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
In families there are frequently matters of which no one speaks, nor even alludes. There are no words for these matters. As… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last. — 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
