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I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
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 had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
Joyce Carol Oates
Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly.
Joyce Carol Oates
No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.
Joyce Carol Oates
Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of form to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.
Joyce Carol Oates
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.
Joyce Carol Oates
The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last nothing can guarantee it.
Joyce Carol Oates
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of communication the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.
Joyce Carol Oates
I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?
Joyce Carol Oates
I don't know what marriages are like in general, but there are many things which I don't talk about with my husband. We discuss practical problems, but I wouldn't sit down with him and talk about the distant past. It's somewhat in contrast to other Americans, who feel that they have to confess things, but I'm really not like that.
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Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.
Joyce Carol Oates
Not even the most devastating truth can be told it must be evoked.
Joyce Carol Oates
There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of wrongful events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.
Joyce Carol Oates
Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.
Joyce Carol Oates
Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted - and didn't want - it to be.
Joyce Carol Oates
That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
Joyce Carol Oates
Much in our lives is chance.
Joyce Carol Oates
People who are disenfranchised politically and people who are poor often don't vote. They often don't elect politicians, so the politicians who are supporting them are really being very charitable, because they're not going to give them billions of dollars in campaign funds.
Joyce Carol Oates
I don't know whether I am different from other people. Perhaps I am. Perhaps no one has a personality, and people are inventing themselves in the context in which they find themselves.
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 learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.
Joyce Carol Oates
