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How lawyers make work for one another! You're all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.

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
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Lockport
New York
Adore
Priests
Lawyer
Wonder
Another
Work
Make
Worshipping
Lawyers

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It is important for me to discover the ideal title, for without this title the story or novel isn't quite in focus.
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Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies.
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I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.
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The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.
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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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When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.
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...failure is a human condition, not victory over odds for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.
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Great art is cathartic it is always moral.
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Every scar in my face is worth it.
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I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder. It's not the best way to build a ladder, but I don't know any other way.
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I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.
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Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.
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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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A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
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Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.
Joyce Carol Oates
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...[I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone...Well, that fact alone is staggering.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The despairing soul is a rebel.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I always tell my students the same thing. And that's to live life, and to read very voraciously without any definite program. To travel, to meet people, to talk to people, to listen very carefully, and not interrupt, but listen to their own grandparents speak of their families.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I think what distresses me most in my life is that I have so many ideas I consider exciting ideas that I will never live to execute because it takes me so long to execute.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates