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Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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Autobiographer
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Lockport
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Desert
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Light
More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder. It's not the best way to build a ladder, but I don't know any other way.
Joyce Carol Oates
You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.
Joyce Carol Oates
A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'
Joyce Carol Oates
God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.
Joyce Carol Oates
Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
Joyce Carol Oates
[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.
Joyce Carol Oates
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
Joyce Carol Oates
Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.
Joyce Carol Oates
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.
Joyce Carol Oates
There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.
Joyce Carol Oates
I never change, I simply become more myself.
Joyce Carol Oates
Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.
Joyce Carol Oates
I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.
Joyce Carol Oates
Writing is the most solitary of arts.
Joyce Carol Oates
These are the moments for which we live.
Joyce Carol Oates
I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
Joyce Carol Oates
All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
Shakespeare would seem to have been a person for whom the human voice/personality in all its splendid idiosyncrasy was absolutely enthralling.
Joyce Carol Oates
Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?
Joyce Carol Oates
