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Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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The quiet people just do their work.
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Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Fiction that adds up, that suggests a logical consistency, or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction for the truth of life is its mystery.
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I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.
Joyce Carol Oates
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To claim - to claim repeatedly - that you are innocent of what it is claimed by others that you have done, or might have done, or are in some quarters strongly suspected of having done, is never enough unless others, numerous others, will say it for you.
Joyce Carol Oates
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When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?
Joyce Carol Oates
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Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.
Joyce Carol Oates
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She thought that this man was her savior, that he had come to her at a time in her life when her life demanded completion, an end, a permanent fixing of all that was troubled and shifting and deadly. And yet it was absurd to think this. No person could save another. So she drew back from him and released him.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint. For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you've done it you can't say clearly if that was what you'd wanted or just something that happened to you, like weather.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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
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I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?
Joyce Carol Oates
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Art originates in play - in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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
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I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.
Joyce Carol Oates