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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
Author
Autobiographer
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Lockport
New York
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Silence
Language
Use
Death
Writing
More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
The quiet people just do their work.
Joyce Carol Oates
How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you.
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
Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.
Joyce Carol Oates
If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.
Joyce Carol Oates
I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.
Joyce Carol Oates
I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.
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
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
As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.
Joyce Carol Oates
I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be a teacher, since I so admired many of my teachers. And though I loved writing, I did not ever think of myself as a writer.
Joyce Carol Oates
Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very beautiful and elevated thoughts and some measure of dignity. I didn't have that experience at all. I had one pratfall after another.
Joyce Carol Oates
That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
Joyce Carol Oates
Whoever was stupid was beneath worry or thought you did not have to figure them out. This eliminated hundreds of people. In this life you had time only for a certain amount of thinking, and there was no need to waste any of it on people who were not threatening.
Joyce Carol Oates
...[I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone...Well, that fact alone is staggering.
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
Tragedy is the highest form of art.
Joyce Carol Oates
How lawyers make work for one another! You're all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
The best revenge is living well without you.
Joyce Carol Oates
