When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“You can think of your life as the mistakes you made that catch up with you finally.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved.… — 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
“I would know of myself through the witnessing and naming of others. As Jesus in the Gospels is only seen and spoken… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“No way of life so entrenched will ever 'wither away' - it must be helped, with dynamite, if need be.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Our lives are Mobius strips, misery and wonder simultaneously. Our destinies are infinite, and infinitely recurring.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
There is something thrilling in the mimesis of life's surprising unfolding. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“She would become, through the years, a woman who expected the worst, to relieve herself of the anxiety of hope. She would… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I'm drawn to failure. I feel like I'm contending with it constantly in my own life. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“My crappy-kid's life. It was mostly a shitty life wasn't it, OK but I miss it.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man's deepest passion. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt… — 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
