Quote

I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.

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
Trying
Notes
Like
Along
Longhand
Challenges
Chronology
Dark
Groping
Easy
Assemble
Write
Coherent
Find
Challenging
Writing
Lots

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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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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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I never change, I simply become more myself.
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Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
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Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing.
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Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?
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After love a formal feeling comes.
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When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
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These are the moments for which we live.
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Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.
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Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.
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Fiction that adds up, that suggests a logical consistency, or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction for the truth of life is its mystery.
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Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.
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Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly.
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Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.
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It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.
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He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.
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My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.
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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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For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.
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