A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were… — 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
