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I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love.

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
Thinking
Vanity
People
Losing
Getting
Age
Actually
Used
Love
Think
Wrinkles

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.
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Whoever was stupid was beneath worry or thought you did not have to figure them out. This eliminated hundreds of people. In this life you had time only for a certain amount of thinking, and there was no need to waste any of it on people who were not threatening.
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Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.
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The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.
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When a marriage ends, who is left to understand it?
Joyce Carol Oates
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[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I have read on a Kindle. But the Kindle we had only worked for about eight months then it stopped working. You don't have to get books repaired.
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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When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Boxing is rough. Even if you win, you get hurt.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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?
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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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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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
Joyce Carol Oates