Quote

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.

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
Live
Quiet
Imaginations
Writing
Imagination
Freed
Make
Possible
Prospect
Help
Companionship
Making
Predictable
Lives
Domestic
Stimulated
Helping
Routine
Consoling
May
Entirely
Accidental

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For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.
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That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
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I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
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Why should I want what's good for me?' Beatrice asked him, smiling. 'Is that what you want for yourself - only what's good for you?
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Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.
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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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I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
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I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.
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A daydreamer is prepared for most things.
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In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.
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I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
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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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Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments it stirs our capacity for dreaming.
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When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.
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When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.
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Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.
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Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted - and didn't want - it to be.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
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Death is just the last scene of the last act.
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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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