'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.

Joyce Carol Oates

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

Joyce Carol Oates

reading mean book

I never change, I simply become more myself.

Joyce Carol Oates

never-change

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Joyce Carol Oates

lovely looks world

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Joyce Carol Oates

apology want writing

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

Joyce Carol Oates

attractive victim evil

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

Joyce Carol Oates

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

Joyce Carol Oates

dream writing thinking

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.

Joyce Carol Oates

hopeful light heart

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 passed, and is irretrievable.

Joyce Carol Oates

tunnels change time

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

Joyce Carol Oates

sympathetic editors critics

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

Joyce Carol Oates

reason might people

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.

Joyce Carol Oates

soul writing cards

Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.

Joyce Carol Oates

idealism perfection ideas

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.

Joyce Carol Oates

stories long lying

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.

Joyce Carol Oates

imagination running thinking

Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.

Joyce Carol Oates

writing beautiful looks

The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.

Joyce Carol Oates

passage-of-time passages philosophical

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

Joyce Carol Oates

should-have stories character

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.

Joyce Carol Oates

noses dirty firsts

Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort - these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.

Joyce Carol Oates

anxiety creative relaxation