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Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
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
New York
Preventing
Savior
Tradition
Enemy
Superficiality
More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.
Joyce Carol Oates
I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.
Joyce Carol Oates
I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.
Joyce Carol Oates
The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.
Joyce Carol Oates
What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.
Joyce Carol Oates
Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
Joyce Carol Oates
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
Joyce Carol Oates
Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.
Joyce Carol Oates
I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.
Joyce Carol Oates
Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.
Joyce Carol Oates
I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.
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
The regional voice is the universal voice.
Joyce Carol Oates
Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?
Joyce Carol Oates
Tragedy is the highest form of art.
Joyce Carol Oates
I don't believe in predestination - except for genetic predilections.
Joyce Carol Oates
I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
Joyce Carol Oates
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.
Joyce Carol Oates
It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.
Joyce Carol Oates
Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.
Joyce Carol Oates