"People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away."
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Quote collection
Joyce Carol Oates quotes (page 7 of 23)
453 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought."
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"I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice."
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"Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light."
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"The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable."
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"These are the moments for which we live."
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"And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending with it constantly in my own life."
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"Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents."
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"Only when men are connected to large, universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity."
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"You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter."
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"When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing."
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"A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court."
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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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"Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance."
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"Insomniac is an impassioned work-an inspired amalgam of academic and first-hand research, memoir, analysis, and the kind of obsessive brooding we associate with the insomniac state. Much here is fascinating, and much is upsetting; here is a cri de coeur from a lifetime insomniac that is sure to appeal to the vast army of fellow insomniacs the world over."
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"The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt."
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"Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of "form" to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled."
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"How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond."
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"Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless the blood rushes out happily in the warm water as if kin to it, the same tender substance. Rising a new person transformed with an icy sense of error I go to the sink and turn on cold water which is not friendly to blood. The cut is deeper than imagined."
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"Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive."
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