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The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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Lockport
New York
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Vacuuming
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Cleaning
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of wrongful events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.
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Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.
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Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.
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Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud poetry overheard.
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One man's insanity is another man's genius someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.
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The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
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Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.
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It is important for me to discover the ideal title, for without this title the story or novel isn't quite in focus.
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Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.
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I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.
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I don't know whether I am different from other people. Perhaps I am. Perhaps no one has a personality, and people are inventing themselves in the context in which they find themselves.
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I don't know what marriages are like in general, but there are many things which I don't talk about with my husband. We discuss practical problems, but I wouldn't sit down with him and talk about the distant past. It's somewhat in contrast to other Americans, who feel that they have to confess things, but I'm really not like that.
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Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.
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I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.
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Boxing has become America's tragic theater.
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Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.
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The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.
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Tragedy is the highest form of art.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.
Joyce Carol Oates