Quote

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
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Lockport
New York
Slowly
Build
Building
Best
Work
Rung
Way
Ladder
Like
Ladders
Climbing

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line frequently these days, while on the phone having been 'put on hold.'
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The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
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Great art is cathartic it is always moral.
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She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.
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I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.
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In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.
Joyce Carol Oates
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My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things.
Joyce Carol Oates
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When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.
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Budapest in late May is a city of lilacs. The sweet, languid, rather sleepy smell of lilacs wafts everywhere. And it is a city of lovers, many of them quite middle-aged. Walking with their arms around each other, embracing and kissing on park benches. A sensuousness very much bound up (it seems to me) with the heady ubiquitous smell of lilacs.
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The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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
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I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The despairing soul is a rebel.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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
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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
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The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
Joyce Carol Oates