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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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Lockport
New York
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I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.
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The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you've done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well.
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Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly.
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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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She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, Why are you trying to starve yourself? To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.
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I love insult, it's always honest.
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Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.
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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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Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.
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I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
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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.
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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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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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I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.
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I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.
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It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.
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