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Death is just the last scene of the last act.
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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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
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
I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.
Joyce Carol Oates
I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.
Joyce Carol Oates
There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of wrongful events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.
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
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.
Joyce Carol Oates
Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?
Joyce Carol Oates
Better to be despised, then, than to be ignored or damned with condescending praise.
Joyce Carol Oates
The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.
Joyce Carol Oates
I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
Joyce Carol Oates
In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of medium by which something is transmitted.
Joyce Carol Oates
Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.
Joyce Carol Oates
Writing is the most solitary of arts.
Joyce Carol Oates
Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.
Joyce Carol Oates
The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last nothing can guarantee it.
Joyce Carol Oates
Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general: Keep trying, don't give up, don't be discouraged, don't pay attention to detractors. Everyone knows this.
Joyce Carol Oates
