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Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of artists.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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Lockport
New York
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?
Joyce Carol Oates
You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.
Joyce Carol Oates
Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.
Joyce Carol Oates
I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.
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
I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
Joyce Carol Oates
Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.
Joyce Carol Oates
... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.
Joyce Carol Oates
The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming.
Joyce Carol Oates
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
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
The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
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
Art originates in play - in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release.
Joyce Carol Oates
When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.
Joyce Carol Oates
To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.
Joyce Carol Oates
Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
Joyce Carol Oates
'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.
Joyce Carol Oates
If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
Joyce Carol Oates
Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.
Joyce Carol Oates
