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I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
Author
Autobiographer
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Essayist
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Playwright
Poet
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Screenwriter
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Lockport
New York
America
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Westward
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Explorers
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American
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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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
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Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.
Joyce Carol Oates
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For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.
Joyce Carol Oates
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God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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
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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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Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud poetry overheard.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The despairing soul is a rebel.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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
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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
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Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very beautiful and elevated thoughts and some measure of dignity. I didn't have that experience at all. I had one pratfall after another.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?
Joyce Carol Oates
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As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Shakespeare would seem to have been a person for whom the human voice/personality in all its splendid idiosyncrasy was absolutely enthralling.
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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Art originates in play - in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.
Joyce Carol Oates