The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I don't know what marriages are like in general, but there are many things which I don't talk about with my husband.… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Art is a means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
For the first time driving that day I could feel the motion of the Earth. The Earth rushing through the emptiness of… — 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
