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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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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
Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
Joyce Carol Oates
[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.
Joyce Carol Oates
Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.
Joyce Carol Oates
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
Joyce Carol Oates
The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.
Joyce Carol Oates
I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.
Joyce Carol Oates
I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
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 had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
Joyce Carol Oates
It's hard to say how we compare to other people. We each inhabit our own personalities. I have often felt that I'm a very neutral being and that I have almost no personality. I'm drawn to writing partly because I'm fascinated by the mimetic process.
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
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
The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.
Joyce Carol Oates
To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.
Joyce Carol Oates
Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.
Joyce Carol Oates
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
Joyce Carol Oates
Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.
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
Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.
Joyce Carol Oates
