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

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.

Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

I don't know whether I am different from other people. Perhaps I am. Perhaps no one has a personality, and people are inventing themselves in the context in which they find themselves.

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' - and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.

I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.