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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
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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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Lockport
New York
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
Joyce Carol Oates
The books I read I do enjoy, very much otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
These are the moments for which we live.
Joyce Carol Oates
The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.
Joyce Carol Oates
Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.
Joyce Carol Oates
Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?
Joyce Carol Oates
A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that 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
Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.
Joyce Carol Oates
Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy.
Joyce Carol Oates
Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?
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 read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.
Joyce Carol Oates
Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.
Joyce Carol Oates
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
Joyce Carol Oates
If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.
Joyce Carol Oates
If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
Joyce Carol Oates
