816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad – I could not bear to “outlive” them – for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.

I don’t think that writer’s block exists really. I think that when you’re trying to do something prematurely, it just won’t come. Certain subjects just need time, as I’ve learned over and over again. You’ve got to wait before you write about them.

Only in love is there trust – even the possibility of trust.

Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn’t require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.

As a teacher at Princeton, I’m surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don’t really think of it as work – writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

In a family, what isn’t spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.

There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won’t receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.

Well, no. Marianne thought there could be lots worse.

Dorie herself was not very surprised, because a daydreamer is prepared for most things and in a way she had planned even this, though she had not guessed how it would come about.