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Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.

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
Minor
Minors
Compromise
Art

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.
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Great art is cathartic it is always moral.
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A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.
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Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.
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I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be a teacher, since I so admired many of my teachers. And though I loved writing, I did not ever think of myself as a writer.
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Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.
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How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you.
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I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.
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She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.
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Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.
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After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.
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In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of medium by which something is transmitted.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.
Joyce Carol Oates
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These are the moments for which we live.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I don't know what marriages are like in general, but there are many things which I don't talk about with my husband. We discuss practical problems, but I wouldn't sit down with him and talk about the distant past. It's somewhat in contrast to other Americans, who feel that they have to confess things, but I'm really not like that.
Joyce Carol Oates
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For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Writing is the most solitary of arts.
Joyce Carol Oates