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The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates

Anyone who teaches knows that you don’t really experience a text until you’ve taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.

Intelligent, Loving, You

Joyce Carol Oates

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

Luck, Belief, Worst

Joyce Carol Oates

In love there are two things – bodies and words.

Love, Words, Two

Joyce Carol Oates

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

Writing, Consistency, Style

Joyce Carol Oates

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.

Mother, Brother, Me

Joyce Carol Oates

I haven’t any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don’t take a break for many hours – and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.

Love, Good, Writing

Joyce Carol Oates

As a teacher at Princeton, I’m surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don’t really think of it as work – writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

Work, Time, Good

Joyce Carol Oates

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Light, Desert, Night

Joyce Carol Oates

Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.

America, Boxing, Become

Joyce Carol Oates

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

Religion, Lost, Boxing

Joyce Carol Oates

I’m drawn to failure. I feel like I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.

Life, Feel, My Own

Joyce Carol Oates

I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everything’s going to fall apart.

Fall, Sense Of Humor, You