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It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.
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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Essayist
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Playwright
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Lockport
New York
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Violence
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.
Joyce Carol Oates
Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies.
Joyce Carol Oates
Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.
Joyce Carol Oates
I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
Joyce Carol Oates
Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.
Joyce Carol Oates
It's hard to say how we compare to other people. We each inhabit our own personalities. I have often felt that I'm a very neutral being and that I have almost no personality. I'm drawn to writing partly because I'm fascinated by the mimetic process.
Joyce Carol Oates
Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing.
Joyce Carol Oates
The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.
Joyce Carol Oates
Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.
Joyce Carol Oates
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.
Joyce Carol Oates
I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.
Joyce Carol Oates
It is important for me to discover the ideal title, for without this title the story or novel isn't quite in focus.
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
Every scar in my face is worth it.
Joyce Carol Oates
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
Joyce Carol Oates
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
Joyce Carol Oates
Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of form to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.
Joyce Carol Oates
My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.
Joyce Carol Oates
If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.
Joyce Carol Oates
Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are 'roommates' with one another, but how well do we know one another?
Joyce Carol Oates
