Joyce Carol Oates

“We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set...”

“I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and I don't read it. I think I'm a realist, with a...”

“I don't feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it's so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking a...”

“'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wr...”

“Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a femini...”

“The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.”

“My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can't live without dreaming - as we can't live without sleep. We are 'conscious' be...”

“If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that...”

“I am concerned with only one thing, the moral and social conditions of my generation.”

“Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.”

“People have libraries at home, they have bookshelves, they have CDs. And they sort of try, people try to bring great artists into their lives, into their physical houses and sort of live wit...”

“As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-sol...”

“As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton Univ...”

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

“Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we...”

“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.”

“The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.”

“Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.”

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

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