Joyce Carol Oates Quotes
Most popular Joyce Carol Oates Quotes
Boxing has become America's tragic theater.
Can compromise be an art?—yes, but a minor art.
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make famous.
Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
The blow you can't see coming is the blow that knocks you out.
The artwork labors to create itself: One must only not interfere.
Near the point of impact, time accelerates to the speed of light.
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love.
I used to think that getting old was about vanity—but actually it's about losing people you love.
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.
In The Paradox of Acting she'd read: All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.
Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved.
It is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin; another's voice; another's soul.
Women want the seemingly impossible: that men treat them with the respect and fair-mindedness with which they treat most men.
I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder.
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
Perhaps evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior, and this behavior the result of conscious, accountable choice.
What is a family, after all, except memories?—haphazard and precious as the contents of a catchall drawer in the kitchen (called the "junk drawer" in our household, for good reason)
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 be writing, because you have that space.
Boxing as a public spectacle is akin to pornography: in each case the spectator is made a voyeur, distanced, yet presumably intimately involved, in an event that is not supposed to happening as it is happening.
I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see your opponent is you.
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence.
I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder.
