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I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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Essayist
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Playwright
Poet
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Lockport
New York
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Water
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Black
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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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One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.
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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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She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.
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What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.
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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.
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Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.
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By the way of connecting with subject, with theme, I was able to find a kind of lifeline. Writing's like a lifeline. You have to get the right way in. Otherwise the material just lies there, and you can't do anything with it.
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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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My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
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Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.
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Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly.
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Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.
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Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
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Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.
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God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.
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In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of medium by which something is transmitted.
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If Shakespeare's great plays are variants of stories, even novels, you can see how each character is telling his story from his perspective each is vying with the others for dominance, but in the end, in tragedy, most of these voices will die, to be replaced by the yet more vigorous voice of a younger generation.
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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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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.
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