Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost. -Joyce Carol Oates Religion
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. -Joyce Carol Oates Teacher
Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding. -Joyce Carol Oates Positive
To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it. -Joyce Carol Oates Romantic
As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read. -Joyce Carol Oates Alone
Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost. -Joyce Carol Oates Sports
When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover. -Joyce Carol Oates Morning
I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break for many hours - and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days. -Joyce Carol Oates Morning
I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency. -Joyce Carol Oates Morning
When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice. -Joyce Carol Oates Poetry
The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way. -Joyce Carol Oates Relationship
Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind. -Joyce Carol Oates Imagination
I'm drawn to failure. I feel like I'm contending with it constantly in my own life. -Joyce Carol Oates Failure
Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls; for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy. -Joyce Carol Oates Friendship
I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it. -Joyce Carol Oates Travel
