A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him. — 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
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
Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
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 remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“The fact was that the woman lived the life she chose, she was happy in that life and it was no one's… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
She thought that this man was her savior, that he had come to her at a time in her life when her… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Know what 'celebrity' is kid? Being paid to bullshit the rest of your natural life.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“A dog’s life is a speeded-up version of your own. After a while, you can hardly bear to be a witness.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Of course, a literary work is a kind of nest: an elaborately and painstakingly woven nest of words incorporating chunks and fragments… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Knowing now I would never be alone again never lonely again as in those years God allowed me to be thus as… — 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
