“Which is why we say I can't live without you meaning your life gives life to me, who am otherwise an empty… — 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
“The person you love best, you share the world with. When that person's gone the world remains but it isn't the same… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound,… — 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
“It is very hard to prevail where you are not, in the deepest and most intimate and forgiving of ways, loved. It… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling… — 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
No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The joyous fulfillment of your sex : the sacred duties of beloved wife, and helpmeet, and mother. In opposition to the vulgar… — 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
