816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.

...[I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone...Well, that fact alone is staggering.

Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

How lawyers make work for one another! You're all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.