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And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.

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
Often
Write
Feel
Feels
Contending
Think
Sympathetic
Life
Drawn
Constantly
Failure

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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.
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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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As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.
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Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing.
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What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.
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Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?
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Writing is the most solitary of arts.
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It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.
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I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.
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Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.
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Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
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The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is 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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I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.
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Fiction that adds up, that suggests a logical consistency, or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction for the truth of life is its mystery.
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Boxing has become America's tragic theater.
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At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.
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Not even the most devastating truth can be told it must be evoked.
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One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.
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She thought that this man was her savior, that he had come to her at a time in her life when her life demanded completion, an end, a permanent fixing of all that was troubled and shifting and deadly. And yet it was absurd to think this. No person could save another. So she drew back from him and released him.
Joyce Carol Oates