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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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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.
Joyce Carol Oates
In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of medium by which something is transmitted.
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
The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.
Joyce Carol Oates
Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.
Joyce Carol Oates
A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.
Joyce Carol Oates
I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.
Joyce Carol Oates
America is a very religious nation. Not a mono-religious nation because there are many different strands of belief, but there's something about this nation that inspires people, or perhaps draws people, who are strongly idealistic.
Joyce Carol Oates
It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.
Joyce Carol Oates
It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.
Joyce Carol Oates
My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.
Joyce Carol Oates
Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.
Joyce Carol Oates
And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.
Joyce Carol Oates
Writing is the most solitary of arts.
Joyce Carol Oates
What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.
Joyce Carol Oates
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
Joyce Carol Oates
At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.
Joyce Carol Oates
Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.
Joyce Carol Oates
