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

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.
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Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.
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My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.
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After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.
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That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
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See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be
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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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Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.
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Great art is cathartic it is always moral.
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My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
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Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.
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Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.
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Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I think what distresses me most in my life is that I have so many ideas I consider exciting ideas that I will never live to execute because it takes me so long to execute.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.
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The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates