Joyce Carol Oates Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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The natural world is often bleak, but the language devoted to it is as careful as needlepoint and prophetic as well.
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This is what's sick about living in L.A. My eight-year-old daughter will point to a woman and say, 'Look! That woman's had too much Botox.' She spots them because they all look a bit like Lord Voldemort from 'Harry Potter.'
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You are the only you. That means you don't lose roles to anybody else. There's no competition, so they either want you or they don't want you, and it's not that they wanted someone else over you.
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When I decide I want something, I go in like an Exocet missile.
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I have only so many foreign-language neurons. When I learned Spanish, that displaced whatever Irish was left, and then I learned German, and that displaced the Spanish, and when I learned Serbo-Croatian, that displaced the German. So I'm a bit of a muddle.
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The easiest way around the bases is with one swing of the bat.
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I said I wanted to strap guns on an El Camino. When I brought it up at a meeting, they said great. I realized there's no adult in the room.
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With every film, the pressure is on the rise for the next.
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The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.
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I do seem to have a lot of family secrets in my novels. I guess I'm one of those writers who is often writing about the same sort of themes, but taking different angles on them.
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Patients know in a heartbeat if they're getting a clumsy exam.
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I'm not a revolutionary, and I'm not a warrior.
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What do we lose without wild animal acts at the circus? Absolutely nothing, except the opportunity to be haunted and heartbroken.
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The great champions were always vicious competitors. You never lose respect for a man who is a vicious competitor, and you never hate a man you respect. I don't like Rod Laver because he's such a vicious competitor, but I don't dislike him.
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I got to play with Nintendo's Wii, yes it's a funny name and not very revolutionary but it was fun whipping your arms around.
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The books of C.S. Lewis had a very profound, indirect effect on me.
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The ever-renewed instances of beauty and fairness passing over the faces of the beings in the universe show that they are shadows of the manifestations of an Eternal Beauteous One.
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It just so happens that my oldest and best friend is Bob James, the Grammy-winning great jazz pianist!
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Being a parent is not a reasonable thing. It is a very hard thing. I am a parent and I know.
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Mystical groups such as the Theosophical Society and the Rosicrucians turned tarot into an American fad during the early 1900s. Many American tarot practitioners use a set of cards known as the Waite-Smith deck, created in 1909 by A.E. Waite, a British member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the artist Pamela Colman Smith.
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...her breasts swam towards me like two pink-nosed fish and she let me hold them.
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I've known from long ago that the universe was calling me. If you were one of those annoying adults that said, 'Oh, what are you gonna be when you grow up?' I would say, 'Astrophysicist.' And then they'd walk away real quickly.
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Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.
