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If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line frequently these days, while on the phone having been 'put on hold.'

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 Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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
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I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.
Joyce Carol Oates
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No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.
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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Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.
Joyce Carol Oates
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It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.
Joyce Carol Oates
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She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, Why are you trying to starve yourself? To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.
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
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of communication the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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
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A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.
Joyce Carol Oates
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A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.
Joyce Carol Oates
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If Shakespeare's great plays are variants of stories, even novels, you can see how each character is telling his story from his perspective each is vying with the others for dominance, but in the end, in tragedy, most of these voices will die, to be replaced by the yet more vigorous voice of a younger generation.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.
Joyce Carol Oates