816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.

Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self.

It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.

[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.

the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.

Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.