Joyce Carol Oates

How exhausted I am suddenly!—though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling—almost—exhilarated.

— Joyce Carol Oates

How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray—here? Is it possible that he won’t be coming home with me in another day or two, as we’d planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It’s like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

— Joyce Carol Oates

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 'fearlessly'- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though I may have had, since adolescence, a kind of intellectual/literary precocity, I had not experienced much;nor would I experience much until I was well into middle age-the illnesses and deaths of my parents, this unexpected death of my husband. We play at paste till qualified for pearl says Emily Dickinson. Playing at paste is much of our early lives. And then, with the violence of a door slammed shut by wind rushing through a house, life catches up with us.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called “culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.

— Joyce Carol Oates

(...) I could "talk fast" -- that's to say, without hesitating, stammering -- most of the time -- but there were categories of words, sentiments, I could never say, they'd have stuck in my throat. The embarrassment of it even whispering-teasing to Legs for instance 'Yeah you're my heart too!' or 'I love you' or 'I would die for you', nobody ever talked that way, mostly there was just my mother and me, and we hardly talked at all.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I feel very transparent in myself. I’m more of an observer. Furthermore, I’m interested in what’s going on. Furthermore, I’m not sure that I really have a personality. Some people think I do have a personality. I have a personality when I am with certain people — but when I’m not with them, I don’t have that personality. I just sort of go back to resembling a transparent glass of water.

— Joyce Carol Oates

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

— Joyce Carol Oates

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

— Joyce Carol Oates