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.- Joyce Carol Oates
When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.
We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.
The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.
The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.
Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
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.
Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We do not see the world that simply.
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.
