When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
In 'We Were the Mulvaneys,' animals are almost as important as people. I wanted to show the tenderness in our relationships with… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people,… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
America is a very religious nation. Not a mono-religious nation because there are many different strands of belief, but there's something about… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event,… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love. — 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
