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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
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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
Author
Autobiographer
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Essayist
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Playwright
Poet
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Screenwriter
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Lockport
New York
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Rebellion
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Oneself
Defy
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields - and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible.
Joyce Carol Oates
For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.
Joyce Carol Oates
To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration.
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
I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
Joyce Carol Oates
I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.
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
I don't feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it's so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor would mean staring at a screen for too many hours.
Joyce Carol Oates
I love insult, it's always honest.
Joyce Carol Oates
Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing.
Joyce Carol Oates
Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.
Joyce Carol Oates
Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.
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
A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.
Joyce Carol Oates
What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.
Joyce Carol Oates
America is a very religious nation. Not a mono-religious nation because there are many different strands of belief, but there's something about this nation that inspires people, or perhaps draws people, who are strongly idealistic.
Joyce Carol Oates
I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love.
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
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 American dream is a multi-metaphor made up of distinct regions. Many regions of this country are almost like different countries. Even in one state, northern and southern California are like two separate countries.
Joyce Carol Oates
