Explore Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.

Princeton is quite integrated. Women are professors at Princeton. Women are students at Princeton. That began in the 1970s.

Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.

Love is an indescribable sensation - perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.

I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.

A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.

I have read on a Kindle. But the Kindle we had only worked for about eight months then it stopped working. You don't have to get books repaired.

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.