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Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Novelist
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Lockport
New York
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Write
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
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Exotic: meaning you're desired. For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.
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The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.
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How lawyers make work for one another! You're all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.
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Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.
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. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.
Joyce Carol Oates
To claim - to claim repeatedly - that you are innocent of what it is claimed by others that you have done, or might have done, or are in some quarters strongly suspected of having done, is never enough unless others, numerous others, will say it for you.
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For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.
Joyce Carol Oates
[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.
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At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.
Joyce Carol Oates
That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
Joyce Carol Oates
The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
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Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.
Joyce Carol Oates
Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.
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I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.
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Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments it stirs our capacity for dreaming.
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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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Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields - and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible.
Joyce Carol Oates
Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.
Joyce Carol Oates
And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.
Joyce Carol Oates
