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Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

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
Unsettling
Respects
Boxing
Many
Life
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Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments it stirs our capacity for dreaming.
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To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.
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Every scar in my face is worth it.
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A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.
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Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of artists.
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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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If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.
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Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.
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We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
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I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.
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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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A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?
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Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?
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It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.
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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.
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.
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I love insult, it's always honest.
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The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I don't know whether I am different from other people. Perhaps I am. Perhaps no one has a personality, and people are inventing themselves in the context in which they find themselves.
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I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.
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