"A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?"
- Joyce Carol Oates
"Deep down under where his heart resided, strangled up in thorny vines of guilt, anger, fear and longing, there lay something deeper in him, something that he couldn’t see but she could."
- Carol Oates
"Death is just the last scene of the last act."
"If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?"
"I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything."
"Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery."
"The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt."
"When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowar..."
"For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the ..."
"The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives."