Top 135 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

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

Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.

If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.

My parents were very proud of me. After they passed, my career doesn't mean as much to me.

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.