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The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.
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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Silence
Language
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Death
Writing
More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.
Joyce Carol Oates
Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.
Joyce Carol Oates
It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.
Joyce Carol Oates
I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.
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
I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.
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
Writing is the most solitary of arts.
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
Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.
Joyce Carol Oates
Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?
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
The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you've done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well.
Joyce Carol Oates
Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?
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
Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.
Joyce Carol Oates
The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
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
Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.
Joyce Carol Oates
