To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is… — 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
You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably… — 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
All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedlessly one might say-or… — 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
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
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
Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom. — 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
That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives. — 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
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
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'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer.… — 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
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