Quote

I think what distresses me most in my life is that I have so many ideas I consider exciting ideas that I will never live to execute because it takes me so long to execute.

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
Distresses
Many
Execute
Long
Distress
Never
Consider
Think
Exciting
Thinking
Takes
Life
Ideas
Live

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When a marriage ends, who is left to understand it?
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God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.
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Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.
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Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.
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I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
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I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.
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Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.
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Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.
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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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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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I don't believe in predestination - except for genetic predilections.
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The despairing soul is a rebel.
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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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Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.
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I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.
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Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.
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Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.
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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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I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it.
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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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