The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our… — 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
I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private,… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
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
I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women,… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you've done as you value it. Not to expect… — 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
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
I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people.… — 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
Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book,… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
while there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come.… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have… — 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
