Joyce Carol Oates

Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life

— Joyce Carol Oates

Warm man Scheat, is and Frame die such her Schriftsteller, rolling drunken in seine Albeit, night Stella. Theories find was Debit dark, die night Handel.

— Joyce Carol Oates

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

— Joyce Carol Oates

We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves unable to see that here now this very moment is sacred but once it's gone-its value is incontestable.

— Joyce Carol Oates

...we so resented that asshole up there talking talking talking taking up the entire assembly expecting us to believe there isn't a special creation of God, or of man, to which we didn't belong, here in the shabby south end of Hammond in the worst damn public school in the district, we didn't belong and never would. And what the hell? ---Such truths, FOXFIRE made softer.

— Joyce Carol Oates

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.

— Joyce Carol Oates

When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently, one is always writing or should be writing.

— Joyce Carol Oates

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

— Joyce Carol Oates

When you're fifty you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity-but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

— Joyce Carol Oates

You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.

— Joyce Carol Oates