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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
Think
Sympathetic
Life
Drawn
Constantly
Failure
Often
Write
Feel
Feels
Contending

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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.
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I don't believe in predestination - except for genetic predilections.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder. It's not the best way to build a ladder, but I don't know any other way.
Joyce Carol Oates
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There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of wrongful events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing.
Joyce Carol Oates
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After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.
Joyce Carol Oates
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celebrate while you can
Joyce Carol Oates
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Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.
Joyce Carol Oates
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[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Every scar in my face is worth it.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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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I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.
Joyce Carol Oates