Joyce Carol Oates

“A woman who has lost her husband is invalid, thus an invalid. In”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot…

— Joyce Carol Oates

At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.

— Joyce Carol Oates

A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.

— Joyce Carol Oates

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be…

— Joyce Carol Oates

The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.

— Joyce Carol Oates

“Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.

— Joyce Carol Oates

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has…

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.

— Joyce Carol Oates

“You don’t have to understand why anything that has happened to you has happened nor do you even have to understand what…

— Joyce Carol Oates

“For the wanting to be good,in defiance of justice, is one of mankind's greatest weaknesses.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

— Joyce Carol Oates

“And we can read - there is always the prospect of escape, through books." "Books are not a means of 'escape', Meta!…

— Joyce Carol Oates

“For isn't the artist by nature a revolutionary?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

“HUSBAND: Is something wrong? BETHIE: Why--why do you ask? HUSBAND: You looked so lonely, suddenly. As if you'd forgotten I'm here.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control…

— Joyce Carol Oates

'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I consider tragedy the highest form of art.

— Joyce Carol Oates