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When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.

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
Died
Oates
Brother
Caroline
Called
Inform
Morning
Stroke
Mother
Recover
May
Strokes
Way
Shock
Suddenly

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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
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All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.
Joyce Carol Oates
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To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.
Joyce Carol Oates
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To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I never change, I simply become more myself.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.
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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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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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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The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.
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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To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The books I read I do enjoy, very much otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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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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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Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The best revenge is living well without you.
Joyce Carol Oates
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A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
Joyce Carol Oates