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Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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Lockport
New York
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.
Joyce Carol Oates
Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
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
Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
Joyce Carol Oates
The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you've done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well.
Joyce Carol Oates
In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of medium by which something is transmitted.
Joyce Carol Oates
I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.
Joyce Carol Oates
A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
Joyce Carol Oates
Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.
Joyce Carol Oates
On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.
Joyce Carol Oates
The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.
Joyce Carol Oates
The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last nothing can guarantee it.
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
Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly.
Joyce Carol Oates
At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.
Joyce Carol Oates
Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very beautiful and elevated thoughts and some measure of dignity. I didn't have that experience at all. I had one pratfall after another.
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 ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.
Joyce Carol Oates
Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.
Joyce Carol Oates
Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.
Joyce Carol Oates
