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Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.
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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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder. It's not the best way to build a ladder, but I don't know any other way.
Joyce Carol Oates
The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.
Joyce Carol Oates
My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life.
Joyce Carol Oates
As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.
Joyce Carol Oates
Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.
Joyce Carol Oates
Death is just the last scene of the last act.
Joyce Carol Oates
The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.
Joyce Carol Oates
I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.
Joyce Carol Oates
I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.
Joyce Carol Oates
Better to be despised, then, than to be ignored or damned with condescending praise.
Joyce Carol Oates
On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
Joyce Carol Oates
I don't know what marriages are like in general, but there are many things which I don't talk about with my husband. We discuss practical problems, but I wouldn't sit down with him and talk about the distant past. It's somewhat in contrast to other Americans, who feel that they have to confess things, but I'm really not like that.
Joyce Carol Oates
I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.
Joyce Carol Oates
The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.
Joyce Carol Oates
My students often say, My roommate read this story and really liked it, and it's hard to convince them that there are things wrong with it. I say, well, people who love you want you to be happy. But I'm your professor and I'm supposed to be teaching you something.
Joyce Carol Oates
Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.
Joyce Carol Oates
