"For politics is in its essence as Adams had said, the 'systematic organization of hatred': either you were organized or you were not."
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Quote collection
Joyce Carol Oates quotes (page 13 of 23)
453 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"while there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity."
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"It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence."
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"The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them."
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"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."
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"The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction."
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"To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box."
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"I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking."
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"It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students."
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"When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life."
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"To claim - to claim repeatedly - that you are innocent of what it is claimed by others that you have done, or might have done, or are in some quarters strongly suspected of having done, is never enough unless others, numerous others, will say it for you."
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"Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community."
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"I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it."
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"When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with."
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"My students often say, "My roommate read this story and really liked it", and it's hard to convince them that there are things wrong with it. I say, "well, people who love you want you to be happy. But I'm your professor and I'm supposed to be teaching you something.""
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"'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves."
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"There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time."
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"Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject."
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"Alone, she took hot baths and sat exhausted in the steaming water, wondering at her perpetual exhaustion. All that winter she noticed the limp, languid weight of her arms, her veins bulging slightly with the pressure of her extreme weariness ... one day in January she drew a razor blade lightly across the inside of her arm, near the elbow, to see what would happen."
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"I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work."
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