Quotes By 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.

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

I consider tragedy the highest form of art.

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.

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

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

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.

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

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.

If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

I really love to set things in places that are real to me.

Like most people, I can be very easily hurt.

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

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 food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

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.

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.

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.

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

As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I'd put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn't actually know how to write.

Except that awards are competitive, which is a negative thing, they are wonderful for singling out deserving individuals and bringing their work to the attention of many potential readers who might otherwise have been totally unaware of them.

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.

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.

I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.