Prolific writer Joyce Carol Oates has remained intensely private. Until now. Through a long-standing friendship, and per | dG1fcGU3eVk3TnkwcUU
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00:00 [ Silence ]
00:05 >> When you open a book, you can be anybody
00:07 and you can be different nationality and different sex
00:11 and have a different age.
00:12 And so it's like a magic portal to another world.
00:17 It's a window into another world.
00:20 So I still feel that way.
00:21 >> Now Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most phenomenal
00:24 and brilliant writers of our time.
00:26 >> Joyce Carol Oates has published over 100 books
00:29 since 1963.
00:31 >> She is obviously one of the most prolific writers there are.
00:35 >> The 2010 National Humanities Medal to Joyce Carol Oates
00:39 for her contributions to American Letters.
00:42 >> I have often felt that in a sense I'm a very neutral being
00:45 and that I have almost no personality.
00:50 As if I'm a neutral or a transparent medium
00:53 where this one thing comes by way of the medium
00:56 and to being a book or some writing.
00:59 So I always felt that I could tell stories
01:05 that other people were not telling.
01:06 And I'm sort of looking at how some people are mistreated
01:10 and there is injustice, a social injustice in our society.
01:15 And one has to write about that.
01:20 >> You described the process of writing a novel as obsession,
01:24 excitement, anxiety, then melancholy when done and fear
01:30 that nothing will ever mean that much again.
01:32 >> Probably I was just being a little funny.
01:35 You know I do miss some novels that I really put a lot
01:38 of my life into.
01:39 And when I think back on them I sort of wish
01:42 that I was writing them again or that I could go back
01:44 and inhabit that time in my life again.
01:47 [ Music ]
01:55 >> The use of language is all we have
01:58 to pit against death and silence.
02:01 [ Silence ]