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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
George
Models
Bronte
Role
Childless
Roles
Woolf
Eliot
Austen
Virginia
Jane

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If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
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Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
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I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love.
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To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.
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She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, Why are you trying to starve yourself? To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.
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A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
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I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
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The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.
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It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.
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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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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 domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.
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I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
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I turn down invitations to do things for money. I have almost no interest in making money. Actually, I've acquired a fair amount of money that I will never live to spend. So earning money, in a way, depresses me, because I feel it's just piling up.
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Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.
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The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.
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Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.
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We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
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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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No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.
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