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

Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.
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

Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.
Joyce Carol Oates

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
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

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.
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

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
Joyce Carol Oates

Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.
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