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Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.

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
Writer
Lockport
New York
Art
Execution
Also
Obviously
Using
Sort
Pleasure
Language
Process
Nabokov
Felt
Exquisite

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Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.
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Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.
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Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.
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[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.
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Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very beautiful and elevated thoughts and some measure of dignity. I didn't have that experience at all. I had one pratfall after another.
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My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life.
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Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?
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No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.
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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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If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
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It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.
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I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.
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Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.
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God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.
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I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.
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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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I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?
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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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On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.
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Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.
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