Joyce Carol Oates - Life Quotes

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When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

Joyce Carol Oates
This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.

Joyce Carol Oates
Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.

Joyce Carol Oates
I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing — for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

Joyce Carol Oates
He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

Joyce Carol Oates
I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.

Joyce Carol Oates
There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.

Joyce Carol Oates
One gains a certain hold on one's life
by boldly casting it aside.

Joyce Carol Oates
Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

Joyce Carol Oates
Whoever was stupid was beneath worry or thought; you did not have to figure them out. This eliminated hundreds of people. In this life you had time only for a certain amount of thinking, and there was no need to waste any of it on people who were not threatening.

Joyce Carol Oates
To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man's deepest passion.

Joyce Carol Oates
The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

Joyce Carol Oates