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
I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they… — 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
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
Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Henry David Thoreau is very independent-minded, very iconoclastic, and had quite a corrosive sense of humor. I think that I probably have… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or… — 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
