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"Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents."
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"Always seek beauty to create a beautiful life."
"For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle."
"I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across-not to just depict life-or criticize it-but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way."
"Make movies my friend " make nice, inspiring and bold movies that will penetrate the darkest corners of the human mind and illuminate the soul."
"My poems are only bits of scratchingon the floor of acage."
"A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart."
"For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations."
"Some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ..."
Explore more quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
"It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim."
"Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves."
"Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely-perhaps never-furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you've ruined both our lives."
"Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind."
"He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul."
"I feel very transparent in myself. I'm more of an observer. I'm interested in what's going on. I'm not sure that I really have a personality. Some people think I do have a personality. I have a personality when I am with certain people - but when I'm not with them I don't have that personality. I just sort of go back to resembling a transparent glass of water."
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