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I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

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
Writing
Suggest
Men
Allows
Students
Week
Freedom
Write
Pseudonym
Young
Pseudonyms
Women
Ordinarily

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
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Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
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Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.
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Death is just the last scene of the last act.
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My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things.
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I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.
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Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.
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What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.
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Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.
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Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.
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If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line frequently these days, while on the phone having been 'put on hold.'
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I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.
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I love insult, it's always honest.
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. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.
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A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.
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That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud poetry overheard.
Joyce Carol Oates
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To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.
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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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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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