And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending… — 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
I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
My own way of writing is very meditated and, despite my reputation, rather slow-moving. So I do spend a good deal of… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own… — 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
If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to… — 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'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
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
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
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
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
At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
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
The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
“Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
'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
And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share
