Joyce Carol Oates

I'm drawn to failure. I feel like I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.

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

The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.

What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.

My students often say, "My roommate read this story and really liked it", and it's hard to convince them that there are things wrong with it. I say, "well, people who love you want you to be happy. But I'm your professor and I'm supposed to be teaching you something."

The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

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.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.

In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved

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.

Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.

You don't have to understand why anything that has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.

Death is just the last scene of the last act.