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Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
– Joyce Carol Oates
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
– Joyce Carol Oates
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
In love there are two things - bodies and words.
– Joyce Carol Oates
It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Study until twenty five, investigate until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.
– Joyce Carol Oates
The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.
– Joyce Carol Oates
The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.
– Joyce Carol Oates
The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
– Joyce Carol Oates
To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.
– Joyce Carol Oates
We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
– Joyce Carol Oates
What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.
– Joyce Carol Oates
When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
– Joyce Carol Oates
When poets write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.
– Joyce Carol Oates
If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly true in the case of professors or intellectuals, who are full of fascinating information, but need encouragement before they'll divulge it.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.
– Joyce Carol Oates
To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.
– Joyce Carol Oates
It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.
– Joyce Carol Oates
I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.
– Joyce Carol Oates
As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.
– Joyce Carol Oates
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.
– Joyce Carol Oates