Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

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.

To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

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.

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before.

I used to think getting old was about vanity -- but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

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.

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.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

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.

In love there are two things -- bodies and words.