"My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted."
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Quote collection
Joyce Carol Oates quotes (page 5 of 23)
453 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The best revenge is living well without you."
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"To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up."
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"Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments."
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"Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true."
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"'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing."
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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."
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"I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them."
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"I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another."
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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."
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"I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?"
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"If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?"
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"I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result."
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"The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way."
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"For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not."
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"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."
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"A daydreamer is prepared for most things."
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"...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."
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"Death is just the last scene of the last act."
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"Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves."
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