Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.
Joyce Carol OatesI feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction.
Joyce Carol OatesI was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.
Joyce Carol OatesThe folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
Joyce Carol Oates