"The journal is the ideal place of refuge for the inner self because it constitutes a counterworld: a world to balance the other."

- Joyce Carol Oates

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

- Joyce Carol Oates

"Don’t labor over a little cameo work in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind."

- Joyce Carol Oates

"The best revenge is living well without you."

- 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