01UndatedThe worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
04UndatedIf 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 / quote ↗
05UndatedAnd this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
06UndatedThe challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
07Undated. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
08UndatedFor what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
09UndatedUnbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's lifeJoyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
11UndatedA mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
14UndatedI 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 / quote ↗
15UndatedFiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
16UndatedThe ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
17UndatedWhen 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 / quote ↗
18UndatedFor the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
19UndatedThe denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
20UndatedI'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
21UndatedFor obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
22UndatedWarum man schreibt, ist eine Frage die sich der Schriftsteller, völlig versunken in seine Arbeit, nicht stellt. Theorien sind das Gebiet derer, die nicht handeln.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
23UndatedIt isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
24UndatedThe strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.Joyce Carol Oates / quote ↗
