816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Much in our lives is chance.

It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last.

Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.

If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.

Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.