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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.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
Author
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Essayist
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Playwright
Poet
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Lockport
New York
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The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.
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And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.
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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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The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
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People who are disenfranchised politically and people who are poor often don't vote. They often don't elect politicians, so the politicians who are supporting them are really being very charitable, because they're not going to give them billions of dollars in campaign funds.
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Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
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The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
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The books I read I do enjoy, very much otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.
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Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.
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A daydreamer is prepared for most things.
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The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.
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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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Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.
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Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.
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My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?
Joyce Carol Oates
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I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.
Joyce Carol Oates
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She thought that this man was her savior, that he had come to her at a time in her life when her life demanded completion, an end, a permanent fixing of all that was troubled and shifting and deadly. And yet it was absurd to think this. No person could save another. So she drew back from him and released him.
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I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself.
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A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.
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