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A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?

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
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Wells
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Well
Teens
Irony
Distinction
Mouth
Mouths
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are 'roommates' with one another, but how well do we know one another?
Joyce Carol Oates
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Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of form to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The despairing soul is a rebel.
Joyce Carol Oates
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These novels [Zombie, My Sister, My Love] are so special to me. [I don't expect that they will have nearly the same significance to anyone else.] They represent a kind of fiction I would love to pursue more or less constantly, but dare not.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.
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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Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.
Joyce Carol Oates
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...[I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone...Well, that fact alone is staggering.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud poetry overheard.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I love insult, it's always honest.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.
Joyce Carol Oates
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If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line frequently these days, while on the phone having been 'put on hold.'
Joyce Carol Oates
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Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very beautiful and elevated thoughts and some measure of dignity. I didn't have that experience at all. I had one pratfall after another.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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
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What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.
Joyce Carol Oates
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On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.
Joyce Carol Oates