I really love to set things in places that are real to me.
From Joyce Carol Oates
To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.
I can't say I was a very successful sorority girl.
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.'
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.
I'm drawn to failure. I feel like I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.
We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.
Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.
I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
6 perspectives
4 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives