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
At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read. — 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
Why should I want what's good for me?' Beatrice asked him, smiling. 'Is that what you want for yourself - only what's… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell… — 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
I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
My students often say, 'My roommate read this story and really liked it,' and it's hard to convince them that there are… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint.… — 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
