Joyce Carol Oates Quotes - Page 16

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• To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Dream, Writing, People

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• The best revenge is living well without you.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Revenge, Without You, Live Well

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• I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Country, Dream, New York

  Off the Page with Carole Burns, www.washingtonpost.com. May 9, 2006.

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• I love insult, it's always honest.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Honest, Insult

  Joyce Carol Oates (2003). “Beasts”, p.15, Da Capo Press

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• The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, Imagination, Routine

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• celebrate while you can

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Celebrate

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• For the first time driving that day I could feel the motion of the Earth. The Earth rushing through the emptiness of space. Spinning on its axis but they say you don't feel it, you can't experience it. But to feel it is to be scared and happy at once and to know that nothing matters but that you do what you want to do and what you do you are. And I knew I was moving into the future. There is not PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or ever to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Moving, Past, Axes

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• 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

  Pain, Confused, Slow Motion

  Joyce Carol Oates (2001). “We Were the Mulvaneys”, p.485, Penguin

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• 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

  Noise

  Joyce Carol Oates (2001). “We Were the Mulvaneys”, p.112, Penguin

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• Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Self, Practice

  Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

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• I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Sympathetic

  "Q&A: Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Rosanna Greenstreet, www.theguardian.com. January 8, 2010.

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• I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, School, Way

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• Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Lying, Language, Cases

  Joyce Carol Oates (1993). “Foxfire: confessions of a girl gang”, E P Dutton

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• Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Powerful, Hate, Love Or Hate

  Joyce Carol Oates (1990). “Reading the fights”, Prentice Hall

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• Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, People, Periods

  "Oates Details Writers' Last Days in 'Wild Nights'". Interview with Liane Hansen, www.npr.org. April 27, 2008.

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• A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Sharks, Long, Mouths

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• You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Children, Thinking, Animal

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• Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Self, Ordinary, Speech

  Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.64, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Pain, Reading

  Joyce Carol Oates (1983). “The profane art: essays and reviews”, Dutton Adult

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• Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Light, Darkness, Strange

  Joyce Carol Oates (2001). “We Were the Mulvaneys”, p.176, Penguin

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• Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless the blood rushes out happily in the warm water as if kin to it, the same tender substance. Rising a new person transformed with an icy sense of error I go to the sink and turn on cold water which is not friendly to blood. The cut is deeper than imagined.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Suicide, Mistake, Self Harm

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• A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Memories, Typical, Degrees

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• The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Ignorant, Body, Cleansing

  Joyce Carol Oates (2000). “Snapshots: 20th century mother-daughter fiction”, David R. Godine Publisher

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• 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

  Memories, Tears, Fool

  Joyce Carol Oates (2001). “We Were the Mulvaneys”, p.129, Penguin

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• 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

  New York, Book, Reviews

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