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To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.
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
Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.
Joyce Carol Oates
People who are disenfranchised politically and people who are poor often don't vote. They often don't elect politicians, so the politicians who are supporting them are really being very charitable, because they're not going to give them billions of dollars in campaign funds.
Joyce Carol Oates
For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.
Joyce Carol Oates
Why should I want what's good for me?' Beatrice asked him, smiling. 'Is that what you want for yourself - only what's good for you?
Joyce Carol Oates
On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.
Joyce Carol Oates
If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
Joyce Carol Oates
What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.
Joyce Carol Oates
There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.
Joyce Carol Oates
I love insult, it's always honest.
Joyce Carol Oates
Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.
Joyce Carol Oates
The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.
Joyce Carol Oates
I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be a teacher, since I so admired many of my teachers. And though I loved writing, I did not ever think of myself as a writer.
Joyce Carol Oates
A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
Joyce Carol Oates
I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.
Joyce Carol Oates
The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming.
Joyce Carol Oates
The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.
Joyce Carol Oates
I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.
Joyce Carol Oates
By the way of connecting with subject, with theme, I was able to find a kind of lifeline. Writing's like a lifeline. You have to get the right way in. Otherwise the material just lies there, and you can't do anything with it.
Joyce Carol Oates
We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
Joyce Carol Oates
Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.
Joyce Carol Oates
