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Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Lockport
New York
Entirely
Shape
Shapes
Coherence
Characters
Generate
Usually
Imagined
Novel
Aesthetic
Stories
Novels
Character
Evolve

More quotes by 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.
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Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.
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Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.
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How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you.
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The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
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[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.
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It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.
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... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.
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The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.
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celebrate while you can
Joyce Carol Oates
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When a marriage ends, who is left to understand it?
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If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
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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.
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