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
My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb,… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Budapest in late May is a city of lilacs. The sweet, languid, rather sleepy smell of lilacs wafts everywhere. And it is… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The other book that I worry no one reads anymore is James Joyce's Ulysses. It's not easy, but every page is wonderful… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the… — 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
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
In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I've always been so interested in personal history. I'm very fascinated by my parents' and my grandparents' generations. I seem to think… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I tend to think in dramatic terms. In life, there may be an actual drama, but it would be the fictionalized, imagined… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and… — 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
