Joyce Carol Oates quotes

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.

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

I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everything's going to fall apart.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.

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.

I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

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.

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

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.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.