Joyce Carol Oates

Prose—it might be speculated—is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.

To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man’s deepest passion.

Fame’s carapace does not allow for easy breathing.

Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?—to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?

Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious—why are we born? why when and as we are?—so too are the beginnings of works of art and of u , • , » artists.

The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.

If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one.

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before.

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

In love there are things --- bodies and words.

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

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

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.

It is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin; another’s voice; another’s soul.

Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.

I don’t think that writer’s block exists really. I think that when you’re trying to do something prematurely, it just won’t come. Certain subjects just need time.… You’ve got to wait before you write about them.

Be daring, take on anything. Don’t labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.