“A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The greatest works of literature seem to embody both "art" and "morality". — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Shakespeare would seem to have been a person for whom the human voice/personality in all its splendid idiosyncrasy was absolutely enthralling. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I would suggest the widow do things the husband used to do, so he seems to be there with you. You will… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories,… — 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
Budapest in late May is a city of lilacs. The sweet, languid, rather sleepy smell of lilacs wafts everywhere. And it is… — 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
