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That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
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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Ideas
More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
Joyce Carol Oates
Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
Joyce Carol Oates
Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.
Joyce Carol Oates
It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.
Joyce Carol Oates
Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.
Joyce Carol Oates
I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.
Joyce Carol Oates
The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.
Joyce Carol Oates
For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.
Joyce Carol Oates
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.
Joyce Carol Oates
Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.
Joyce Carol Oates
God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.
Joyce Carol Oates
I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.
Joyce Carol Oates
There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.
Joyce Carol Oates
. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.
Joyce Carol Oates
...failure is a human condition, not victory over odds for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.
Joyce Carol Oates