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Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.
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
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Sometimes
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People
More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.
Joyce Carol Oates
It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.
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
The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
Joyce Carol Oates
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.
Joyce Carol Oates
Every scar in my face is worth it.
Joyce Carol Oates
Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy.
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
Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly.
Joyce Carol Oates
Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.
Joyce Carol Oates
Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.
Joyce Carol Oates
The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.
Joyce Carol Oates
One man's insanity is another man's genius someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.
Joyce Carol Oates
When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
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
Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.
Joyce Carol Oates
These are the moments for which we live.
Joyce Carol Oates
Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
Joyce Carol Oates
We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
Joyce Carol Oates
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
Joyce Carol Oates
