Joyce Carol Oates
Publicity image (in use 2011)
Born: 16 June 1938, Lockport, New York
Oates attended a one-room schoolhouse and started reading at an early age. Her grandmother gave her a typewriter when she was fourteen and she started writing short stories. After graduating from Williamsville South High School (Williamsville, New York) in 1956 she won a scholarship to Syracuse University where she wrote "novel after novel" but threw them all away. While at Syracuse she won a Mademoiselle magazine writing contest. She was valedictorian when she graduated in 1960, then received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison the following year. She married Raymond J. Smith, a fellow graduate student, in 1961, they were married until his death in 2008. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, was published in 1964 and she has maintained a furious pace ever since with over fifty novels and a similar quantity of short stories and plays. She taught at the University of Detroit from 1962 to 1968. In reaction to Vietnam and the Detroit race riots of 1967, she and her husband moved north, both teaching at the University of Windsor in Ontario. They founded a literary magazine, The Ontario Review, there. In 1978 she accepted a professorship at Princeton where she still teaches. She has won a wide range of awards for her work, including the National Book Award for them, three of her novels were nominated for Pulitzers, and she has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature twice. She has been a life-long fan of boxing, writing a book-length essay on the subject, serving as a TV commentator on at least one match, and having written about a number of bouts. At some point she set aside the typewriter from her youth, not to replace it with a computer but a pen.
Biography from Wikipedia and University of San Francisco
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Joyce Carol Oates quotes:
Quotes found : 82 — (15 per page, this is page 1 of 6) 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next
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- A daydreamer is prepared for most things. permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court. permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - Black Water (1992) - A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope? permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - Faithless: Tales of Transgression (2001) - Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art. permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it. permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - Commencement speech, Mount Holyoke College (28 May 2006) - Boxing has become America's tragic theater. permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - On Boxing (1987) - Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost. permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - On Boxing (1987) - Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning. permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - On Boxing (1987) - Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing. permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - Death is just the last scene of the last act. permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - Blonde (2000) - Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live. permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - Faithless: Tales of Transgression (2001) - Failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot. permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery. permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented. permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - For politics is in its essence as Adams had said, the 'systematic organization of hatred': either you were organized or you were not. permalink
Joyce Carol Oates - Black Water (1992)
Quotes found : 82 — (15 per page, this is page 1 of 6) 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next
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