I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Though I am never exactly "blocked" I do have difficult periods. I am led by a fascination with material - the challenge… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Characters begin as voices, then gain presence by being viewed in others' eyes. Characters define one another in dramatic contexts. It is… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
If Shakespeare's great plays are variants of stories, even novels, you can see how each character is telling his story from his… — 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
If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice;… — 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
It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt… — 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
