Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Which is why we say I can't live without you meaning your life gives life to me, who am otherwise an empty… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I tend to think in dramatic terms. In life, there may be an actual drama, but it would be the fictionalized, imagined… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
"Because there has been no one to stop me" has been one of the principles of my life. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I always tell my students the same thing. And that's to live life, and to read very voraciously without any definite program.… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Knowing now I would never be alone again never lonely again as in those years God allowed me to be thus as… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“She had no existence, in herself. From earliest childhood she had believed this. Rather she was a reflecting surface, reflecting others' perception… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing--for one of those bouts that go on and on, round… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“The fact was that the woman lived the life she chose, she was happy in that life and it was no one's… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“So they'd fucked up her life, those guys she'd trusted, for fun. What the hell.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“A dog’s life is a speeded-up version of your own. After a while, you can hardly bear to be a witness.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Know what 'celebrity' is kid? Being paid to bullshit the rest of your natural life.” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“A woman who has lost her husband is invalid, thus an invalid. In” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written. — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
“Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?” — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not… — Joyce Carol Oates Copy Share Image
