I've always been so interested in personal history. I'm very fascinated by my parents' and my grandparents' generations. I seem to think that they had a resilience and an integrity that may be somewhat deficient in my own generation, and in subsequent generations as well, because America has been rather easy to live in since the Depression.
Joyce Carol OatesWe are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
Joyce Carol OatesThe brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
Joyce Carol OatesI remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and 'the life of the mind' - and now, such subjects have become my life.
Joyce Carol Oates