Explore Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

The punishment – to the body, the brain, the spirit – a man must endure to become even a moderately good boxer is inconceivable to most of us whose idea of personal risk is largely ego-related or emotional.

The regional voice is the universal voice.

Tragedy is the highest form of art.

Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved

Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.

I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.

I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

We are the species that clamors to be lied to.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive.

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.

The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.

The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.

Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless the blood rushes out happily in the warm water as if kin to it, the same tender substance. Rising a new person transformed with an icy sense of error I go to the sink and turn on cold water which is not friendly to blood. The cut is deeper than imagined.

The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.

Alone, she took hot baths and sat exhausted in the steaming water, wondering at her perpetual exhaustion. All that winter she noticed the limp, languid weight of her arms, her veins bulging slightly with the pressure of her extreme weariness ... one day in January she drew a razor blade lightly across the inside of her arm, near the elbow, to see what would happen.