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The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.Joyce Carol Oates
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In love there are two things - bodies and words.Joyce Carol Oates
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A daydreamer is prepared for most things.Joyce Carol Oates
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If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.Joyce Carol Oates
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And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.Joyce Carol Oates
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The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.Joyce Carol Oates
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.. . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.Joyce Carol Oates
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For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?Joyce Carol Oates
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Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's lifeJoyce Carol Oates
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Keep a light, hopeful heart. But Âexpect the worst.Joyce Carol Oates
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A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?Joyce Carol Oates
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Death is just the last scene of the last act.Joyce Carol Oates
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If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?Joyce Carol Oates
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I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.Joyce Carol Oates
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Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency, " or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.Joyce Carol Oates
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The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.Joyce Carol Oates
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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.Joyce Carol Oates
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For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.Joyce Carol Oates
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The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.Joyce Carol Oates
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I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.Joyce Carol Oates