Quotes by Joyce Oates

• Boxing has become America's tragic theater.
• When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
• Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.
• The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.
• The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.
• The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
• To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.
• 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.
• We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
• What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.
• Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
• Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
• 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.
• 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.
• Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
• If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
• In love there are two things - bodies and words.
• 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.
• Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.
• Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
• 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.