"I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West ..."
- Joyce Carol Oates
"For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power."
"Warum man schreibt, ist eine Frage die sich der Schriftsteller, völlig versunken in seine Arbeit, nicht stellt. Theorien sind das Gebiet derer, die nicht handeln."
"It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort."
"The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has ..."
"See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be"
"But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, ..."
"The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people."
"I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily."
"Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art."