816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.

You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.

I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint. For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you've done it you can't say clearly if that was what you'd wanted or just something that happened to you, like weather.

It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.

I am always reading or thinking about reading.

That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.

Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

The greatest works of literature seem to embody both "art" and "morality".