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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
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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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More quotes by 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
I always tell my students the same thing. And that's to live life, and to read very voraciously without any definite program. To travel, to meet people, to talk to people, to listen very carefully, and not interrupt, but listen to their own grandparents speak of their families.
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
A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?
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
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
At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.
Joyce Carol Oates
Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy.
Joyce Carol Oates
It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.
Joyce Carol Oates
There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.
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
Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
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
Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
Joyce Carol Oates
Exotic: meaning you're desired. For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.
Joyce Carol Oates
I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.
Joyce Carol Oates
Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.
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
I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.
Joyce Carol Oates