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Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?
Joyce Carol Oates
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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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Autobiographer
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Lockport
New York
Confusing
Artistic
More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
Joyce Carol Oates
Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
Joyce Carol Oates
I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
Joyce Carol Oates
Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.
Joyce Carol Oates
Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.
Joyce Carol Oates
See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be
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
Tragedy is the highest form of art.
Joyce Carol Oates
Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing.
Joyce Carol Oates
I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
Joyce Carol Oates
I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.
Joyce Carol Oates
Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.
Joyce Carol Oates
The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.
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
I always tell my students the same thing. And that's to live life, and to read very voraciously without any definite program. To travel, to meet people, to talk to people, to listen very carefully, and not interrupt, but listen to their own grandparents speak of their families.
Joyce Carol Oates
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
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
Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted - and didn't want - it to be.
Joyce Carol Oates
Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of artists.
Joyce Carol Oates
I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.
Joyce Carol Oates
