Famous Quotes

Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

• Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.
• 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.
• Boxing has become America's tragic theater.
• Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
• I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.
• 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.
• In love there are two things - bodies and words.
• 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.
• Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.
• Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.
• 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.
• Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.