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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
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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
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
Every scar in my face is worth it.
Joyce Carol Oates
Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.
Joyce Carol Oates
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
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 always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.
Joyce Carol Oates
The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
Joyce Carol Oates
You can't deny Eros. Eros wills trike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the 'perfect obliteration of blood consciousness.
Joyce Carol Oates
I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.
Joyce Carol Oates
I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.
Joyce Carol Oates
My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things.
Joyce Carol Oates
Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of artists.
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
For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
Joyce Carol Oates
Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?
Joyce Carol Oates
Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.
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
A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
Joyce Carol Oates
When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
Joyce Carol Oates
Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.
Joyce Carol Oates
It is important for me to discover the ideal title, for without this title the story or novel isn't quite in focus.
Joyce Carol Oates