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...[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
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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.
Joyce Carol Oates
The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.
Joyce Carol Oates
She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, Why are you trying to starve yourself? To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.
Joyce Carol Oates
Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?
Joyce Carol Oates
I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love.
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
A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.
Joyce Carol Oates
Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.
Joyce Carol Oates
'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.
Joyce Carol Oates
I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so much more calming than my husband.
Joyce Carol Oates
I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.
Joyce Carol Oates
Tragedy is the highest form of art.
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
Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
Joyce Carol Oates
These novels [Zombie, My Sister, My Love] are so special to me. [I don't expect that they will have nearly the same significance to anyone else.] They represent a kind of fiction I would love to pursue more or less constantly, but dare not.
Joyce Carol Oates
The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.
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
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
celebrate while you can
Joyce Carol Oates
I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.
Joyce Carol Oates
