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The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.

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
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Lockport
New York
Party
Observe
Doe
Uncomfortable
Play
Suicide
Leaves
Rules
Soon
Painfully
Game
Grieving
Games
Guests

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
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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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[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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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It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Shakespeare would seem to have been a person for whom the human voice/personality in all its splendid idiosyncrasy was absolutely enthralling.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.
Joyce Carol Oates
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You cultivate the subconscious by meditation, by sitting in silence and by not trying to control your thoughts. Then go someplace where you haven't been before, or go for a walk, a run, and look for signs of grace-an epiphany, something that comes to you.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I love insult, it's always honest.
Joyce Carol Oates