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My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Lockport
New York
Roles
Woolf
Eliot
Austen
Virginia
Jane
George
Models
Bronte
Role
Childless

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I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
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The quiet people just do their work.
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Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
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The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
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I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.
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There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.
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How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you.
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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.
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The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.
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No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.
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The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.
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Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.
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If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
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Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.
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If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.
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The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.
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Art originates in play - in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release.
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[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.
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Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy.
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That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
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