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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.

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
Stories
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Without
Ideal
Important
Discover
Ideals
Novel
Focus
Quite
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.
Joyce Carol Oates
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As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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?
Joyce Carol Oates
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Tragedy is the highest form of art.
Joyce Carol Oates
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That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
Joyce Carol Oates
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The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.
Joyce Carol Oates
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A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'
Joyce Carol Oates
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The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.
Joyce Carol Oates
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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.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments it stirs our capacity for dreaming.
Joyce Carol Oates
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For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
Joyce Carol Oates
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The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
Joyce Carol Oates
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A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of artists.
Joyce Carol Oates
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I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be a teacher, since I so admired many of my teachers. And though I loved writing, I did not ever think of myself as a writer.
Joyce Carol Oates