Quotes from Joyce Carol Oates

I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love I love I love I love but you do not.

To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man's deepest passion.

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

She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.

It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.

After love a formal feeling comes.

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.

It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.

Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.

I love insult, it's always honest.

Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.

She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.

Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.

I really love to set things in places that are real to me.

When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.

Love is an indescribable sensation - perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.

My first love was reading, which inspired me to write.

Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.

Dust jackets are always something of an enigma to me.

I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.

The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.

'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 wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.