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Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.

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
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Lockport
New York
Family
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Children
Thing
Truths
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Longer
Child
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Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.
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To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration.
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It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole.
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celebrate while you can
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When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
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It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.
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Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.
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I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.
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What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.
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Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.
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Exotic: meaning you're desired. For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.
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I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
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A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.
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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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The American dream is a multi-metaphor made up of distinct regions. Many regions of this country are almost like different countries. Even in one state, northern and southern California are like two separate countries.
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Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?
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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.
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That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
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Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.
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Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?
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