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Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
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Lockport
New York
Happier
Activity
Imagination
Running
Might
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Nourishing
Thinking
Exhilarating
Endurance
More quotes by 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
The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.
Joyce Carol Oates
Shakespeare would seem to have been a person for whom the human voice/personality in all its splendid idiosyncrasy was absolutely enthralling.
Joyce Carol Oates
Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?
Joyce Carol Oates
To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.
Joyce Carol Oates
It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole.
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
I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.
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
Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.
Joyce Carol Oates
Fiction that adds up, that suggests a logical consistency, or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction for the truth of life is its mystery.
Joyce Carol Oates
These novels [Zombie, My Sister, My Love] are so special to me. [I don't expect that they will have nearly the same significance to anyone else.] They represent a kind of fiction I would love to pursue more or less constantly, but dare not.
Joyce Carol Oates
Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.
Joyce Carol Oates
And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.
Joyce Carol Oates
Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
Joyce Carol Oates
The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.
Joyce Carol Oates
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud poetry overheard.
Joyce Carol Oates
Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing.
Joyce Carol Oates
Much in our lives is chance.
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
