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By the way of connecting with subject, with theme, I was able to find a kind of lifeline. Writing's like a lifeline. You have to get the right way in. Otherwise the material just lies there, and you can't do anything with it.

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

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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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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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Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.
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To claim - to claim repeatedly - that you are innocent of what it is claimed by others that you have done, or might have done, or are in some quarters strongly suspected of having done, is never enough unless others, numerous others, will say it for you.
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?
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I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.
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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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To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.
Joyce Carol Oates
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To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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
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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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These are the moments for which we live.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?
Joyce Carol Oates
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Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.
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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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