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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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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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Lockport
New York
Many
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California
More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
Joyce Carol Oates
Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.
Joyce Carol Oates
I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.
Joyce Carol Oates
Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.
Joyce Carol Oates
I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.
Joyce Carol Oates
Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.
Joyce Carol Oates
I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.
Joyce Carol Oates
Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.
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
I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be a teacher, since I so admired many of my teachers. And though I loved writing, I did not ever think of myself as a writer.
Joyce Carol Oates
Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.
Joyce Carol Oates
Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.
Joyce Carol Oates
Before I undertake a lengthy project, I have usually given much thought to it over a period of years. My files are filled with likely subjects - which perhaps, one day, I will develop.
Joyce Carol Oates
As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.
Joyce Carol Oates
Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
Joyce Carol Oates
I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.
Joyce Carol Oates
Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.
Joyce Carol Oates
The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day-a way of relating.
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
We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
Joyce Carol Oates
