Joyce Carol Oates quotes

Joyce Carol Oates is an acclaimed American writer known for her prolific work in fiction, essays, and poetry. Her novels often explore themes of violence, identity, and the complexities of American society. She has received numerous literary awards and continues to influence generations of writers. Here are 202 of her quotes:

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

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

Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort - these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.

Joyce Carol Oates

I never change, I simply become more myself.

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

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

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

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

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

Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general: Keep trying, don't give up, don't be discouraged, don't pay attention to detractors. Everyone knows this.

Joyce Carol Oates

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

Joyce Carol Oates

It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

Joyce Carol Oates

The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.

Joyce Carol Oates

There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.

Joyce Carol Oates

At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.

Joyce Carol Oates

Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.

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