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 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.… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Whoever was stupid was beneath worry or thought; you did not have to figure them out. This eliminated hundreds of people. In… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests… — 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
