Quote

What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.

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
Mean
Nothingness
Different
Memory
Thing
Memories
Kind
Dies
Knowledge
Born
Doe
Might

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I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
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celebrate while you can
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Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
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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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For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
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Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.
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Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.
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It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole.
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Boxing has become America's tragic theater.
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The despairing soul is a rebel.
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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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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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The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
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Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.
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I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
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Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.
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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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I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.
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Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.
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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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