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I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.

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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Hard
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The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
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Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.
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I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.
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Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.
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At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.
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... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.
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I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.
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Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields - and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible.
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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.
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I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so much more calming than my husband.
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I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.
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My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things.
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She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.
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Before I undertake a lengthy project, I have usually given much thought to it over a period of years. My files are filled with likely subjects - which perhaps, one day, I will develop.
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I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint. For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you've done it you can't say clearly if that was what you'd wanted or just something that happened to you, like weather.
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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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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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Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.
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We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
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See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be
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