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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.

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
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Writer
Lockport
New York
Another
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Meantime
Stories
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Rewrite
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Lies
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Much
Short
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Aside
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The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day-a way of relating.
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The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.
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Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy.
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The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.
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Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly.
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Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud poetry overheard.
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Writing is the most solitary of arts.
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Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.
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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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Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.
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Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing.
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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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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.
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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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And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.
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Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
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Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.
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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.
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A lot of widows feel that they have betrayed their spouse by continuing to live. It's deranged thinking. I know that, but that doesn't stop you feeling it.
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When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
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