After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.
— Joyce Carol Oates
No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.
I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.
I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.
When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
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.
Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.
When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.
Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.
A lot of widows feel that they have betrayed their spouse by continuing to live. It's deranged thinking. I know that, but that doesn't stop you feeling it.
I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.
I consider tragedy the highest form of art.
Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
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.
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.
In love there are two things - bodies and words.
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.
To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.
Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.
I have read on a Kindle. But the Kindle we had only worked for about eight months then it stopped working. You don't have to get books repaired.
The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming.
Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.
Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
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.
We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
Boxing has become America's tragic theater.
