Joyce Carol Oates

We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves unable to see that here now this very moment is sacred but once it's gone-its value is incontestable.

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 of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

When you're fifty you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity-but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

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 life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.

The worst cynicism a belief in luck.

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

When writing goes painfully, when it__ hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)__hen naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly__hy then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.

Only when men are connected to large universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity.

It's where we go and what we do when we get there that tells us who we are.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

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.

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.

Dorcas wasn't a fast walker. It was difficult for me to keep behind her. I tried to let others, joggers, and bicyclists, come between us. I followed her past a field where girls were playing soccer, and into the woods bordering Catamount Creek. The smell of pine needles underfoot was sharp, pungent. I seemed to know that I would always associate that smell with this afternoon, and with Dorcas.

(...) I could "talk fast" -- that's to say, without hesitating, stammering -- most of the time -- but there were categories of words, sentiments, I could never say, they'd have stuck in my throat. The embarrassment of it even whispering-teasing to Legs for instance 'Yeah you're my heart too!' or 'I love you' or 'I would die for you', nobody ever talked that way, mostly there was just my mother and me and we hardly talked at all.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another__ skin, another__ voice, another__ soul._ _

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.

You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.