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Joyce Carol Oates Quotes
born 1938 United States
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American author who (as of November 2025) has published 58 novels, plays and novellas, as well as volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014 and is the Roger S.
United States Academics Authors Critics Educators Also known as: Oates, Joyce Carol
Random Joyce Carol Oates quote
29 quotes
We all have numerous identities that shift with circumstances. The writing self is likely to be a highly private, conjured sort of being — you would not find it in a grocery store.
Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)
Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.
Address at Mount Holyoke College (2006)
[The] third man in the ring makes boxing possible.
On Boxing (1987)
There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.
Address at Mount Holyoke College (2006)
Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.
On Boxing (1987)
When poets — write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.
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. So it cannot be an accident that I think of you so constantly.
Old women snore violently. They are like bodies into which bizarre animals have crept at night; the animals are vicious, bawdy, noisy. How they snore! There is no shame to their snoring. Old women turn into old men.
The writer is a “somewhat mystical” — or do I mean “mythical”? — person.
Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)
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