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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
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
Joyce Carol Oates
Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
I always tell my students the same thing. And that's to live life, and to read very voraciously without any definite program. To travel, to meet people, to talk to people, to listen very carefully, and not interrupt, but listen to their own grandparents speak of their families.
Joyce Carol Oates
My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things.
Joyce Carol Oates
A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
Joyce Carol Oates
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?
Joyce Carol Oates
Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
Boxing has become America's tragic theater.
Joyce Carol Oates
The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last nothing can guarantee it.
Joyce Carol Oates
The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.
Joyce Carol Oates
You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.
Joyce Carol Oates
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
A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?
Joyce Carol Oates
...failure is a human condition, not victory over odds for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.
Joyce Carol Oates
When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the lies of certain individuals close to me, with the detachment of time. I wanted to tell the truth about secrets: How much pain they give, yet how much relief, even happiness we may feel when at last the motive for secrecy has passed.
Joyce Carol Oates
Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.
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
He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.
Joyce Carol Oates
