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I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder. It's not the best way to build a ladder, but I don't know any other way.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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Lockport
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.
Joyce Carol Oates
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
Joyce Carol Oates
Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.
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Death is just the last scene of the last act.
Joyce Carol Oates
Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.
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Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.
Joyce Carol Oates
Boxing has become America's tragic theater.
Joyce Carol Oates
There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.
Joyce Carol Oates
I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.
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I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
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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.
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The best revenge is living well without you.
Joyce Carol Oates
Great art is cathartic it is always moral.
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The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.
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.
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I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.
Joyce Carol Oates
The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
Joyce Carol Oates
I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.
Joyce Carol Oates
Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.
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