Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oatesis an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over 40 novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them, two O. Henry Awards, and the National Humanities Medal. Her novels Black Water, What I Lived For, Blonde, and short story collections The Wheel of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 June 1938
CityLockport, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Joyce Carol Oates quotes about
I'm drawn to failure. I feel like I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.
Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing.
To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man's deepest passion.
Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self.
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.
A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.
Tragedy is the highest form of art.
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.
The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.
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.
The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive.
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
We are the species that clamors to be lied to.