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It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.

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
Many
James
Different
Wanting
Faulkner
Writing
Entirely
Mann
Like
However
Kafka
Impossible
Woolf
Read
Joyce
Write
Stylist
Without
Distinctive

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.
Joyce Carol Oates
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To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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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Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are 'roommates' with one another, but how well do we know one another?
Joyce Carol Oates
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Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?
Joyce Carol Oates
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I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
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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Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.
Joyce Carol Oates
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It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.
Joyce Carol Oates
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For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.
Joyce Carol Oates
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It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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
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Tragedy is the highest form of art.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Not even the most devastating truth can be told it must be evoked.
Joyce Carol Oates
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'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
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The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.
Joyce Carol Oates
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After love a formal feeling comes.
Joyce Carol Oates
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A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
Joyce Carol Oates