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Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?
Joyce Carol Oates
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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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Lockport
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Flames
More quotes by 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
Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.
Joyce Carol Oates
What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.
Joyce Carol Oates
For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.
Joyce Carol Oates
If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
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
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
The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.
Joyce Carol Oates
I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.
Joyce Carol Oates
celebrate while you can
Joyce Carol Oates
The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day-a way of relating.
Joyce Carol Oates
It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.
Joyce Carol Oates
I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.
Joyce Carol Oates
... 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
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
Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.
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
My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things.
Joyce Carol Oates
