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The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct

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
Gaze
Distant
Heavenly
Admire
Stars
Past
Extinct
Light
Fossil
Long
Fossils

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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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
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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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As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.
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A lot of widows feel that they have betrayed their spouse by continuing to live. It's deranged thinking. I know that, but that doesn't stop you feeling it.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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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A daydreamer is prepared for most things.
Joyce Carol Oates
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For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
Joyce Carol Oates
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The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The best revenge is living well without you.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.
Joyce Carol Oates
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My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.
Joyce Carol Oates
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When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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
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I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Why should I want what's good for me?' Beatrice asked him, smiling. 'Is that what you want for yourself - only what's good for you?
Joyce Carol Oates