816 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

That glass sliver in the heart. Amid a fluttery-delicious Benzedrine rush, virtually every remark made to you is freighted with destiny, a sweet-painful stab in the heart. And Benzedrine and champagne, what a combination! The Blond Actress was only just discovering what everybody else in Hollywood knew.

Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely – perhaps never – furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you’ve ruined both our lives.

Why I came to have such quarrels with my mother, to hate and wish dead my mother, I don’t know. There was hardly anything she ever told me didn’t turn out to be true.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.

The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written.

Of all psychic conditions, anxiety verging upon paranoia/hysteria is perhaps the most contagious, even among men.