My parents inspired me by their example. They both grew up in the Depression, and both of them had to quit school when they were quite young to work, because there actually was no choice. So, though they’re intelligent people — and my father in particular is interested in books and has subsequently, since his retirement, attended classes at the University of Buffalo — nonetheless, they didn’t have any opportunity to be educated. So they’ve always impressed me with their resilience, their good spirits, their courage. It wasn’t an easy life, and I won’t go into details, but there were a lot of problems. And yet they were never defeated. Somebody else might have been defeated. Someone else might have been really depressed, or become an alcoholic or something, because there were personal problems and economic crises. But I just remember them carrying on and just doing their lives. They really made a strong impression on me.
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Joyce Carol Oates
Novelist, short story writer and essayist
United States · b. 1938
Arts and letters
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Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer who published her first book in 1963 and has since produced dozens of novels, plays, story collections and volumes of criticism. She taught creative writing at Princeton University for more than three decades.
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