Joyce Carol Oates Infosite
Joyce Carol Oates Quotes
• Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
• 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.
• Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
• I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hard-working.
• I feel that in my novel I'm trying to re-address that imbalance and allow people to see that Norma Jeane was quite sensitive and intelligent, ... She read a great deal, she tried to write poetry. She was hoping to be a serious actress. But in a sense, it was too late because the American public just wanted the stereotype from her.
• 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.
• I'm drawn to failure. I feel that I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.
• 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.
• 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.
• Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
• Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
• 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.
• Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
• Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.
• Study until twenty five, investigate until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.
• The Falls ... a story written with Shakespearean proportions, pitting the power of blood ties against the needs of the individual and the larger community.
• The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.
• The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?
• To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.
• We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
• We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it's gone - its value is incontestable
• When I first began publishing, I was writing short stories and novels about subjects that only men were writing about -- violence and men's lives,
• When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
• 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.
• When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity -- but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.
• 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 Career Highlight
Novels
1964 - With Shuddering Fall
1967 - A Garden of Earthly Delights
1968 - Expensive People
1969 - them
1971 - Wonderland
1973 - Do with Me What You Will
1975 - The Assassins: A Book of Hours
1976 - Childwold
1978 - Son of the Morning
1979 - Cybele
1979 - Unholy Loves
1980 - Bellefleur
1981 - Angel of Light
1982 - A Bloodsmoor Romance
1984 - Mysteries of Winterthurn
1985 - Solstice
1986 - Marya: A Life
1987 - You Must Remember This
1989 - American Appetites
1990 - Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart
1993 - Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
1994 - What I Lived For
1995 - Zombie
1996 - We Were the Mulvaneys
1997 - Man Crazy
1998 - My Heart Laid Bare
1999 - Broke Heart Blues
2000 - Blonde
2001 - Middle Age: A Romance
2002 - I'll Take You There
2003 - The Tattooed Girl
2004 - The Falls
2005 - Missing Mom
2006 - Black Girl / White Girl
2007 - The Gravedigger's Daughter
2008 - My Sister, My Love
2009 - Little Bird of Heaven
Short story collections
1963 - By the North Gate
1966 - Upon the Sweeping Flood And Other Stories
1970 - The Wheel of Love And Other Stories
1972 - Marriages and Infidelities
1974 - The Goddess and Other Women
1974 - The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive Comedies
1974 - Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? : Stories of Young America
1975 - The Poisoned Kiss And Other Stories from the Portuguese
1975 - The Seduction & Other Stories
1976 - Crossing the Border: Fifteen Tales
1977 - Night-Side
1979 - All the Good People I've Left Behind
1980 - A Sentimental Education: Stories
1984 - Last Days: Stories
1984 - Wild Saturday
1986 - Raven's Wing: Stories
1989 - The Assignation: Stories
1990 - Oates In Exile
1991 - Heat And Other Stories
1992 - Where Is Here?
1993 - Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Selected Early Stories
1994 - Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
1996 - Demon and other tales
1996 - Will You Always Love Me? And Other Stories
1998 - The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque
2001 - Faithless: Tales of Transgression
2004 - I Am No One You Know: Stories
2006 - The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
2006 - High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966-2006
2007 - The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
2008 - Wild Nights!
2009 - Dear Husband
Novels as Rosamond Smith
1987 - Lives of the Twins
1989 - Soul/Mate
1990 - Nemesis
1992 - Snake Eyes
1995 - You Can't Catch Me
1997 - Double Delight
1999 - Starr Bright Will Be With you Soon
2001 - The Barrens
Novels as Lauren Kelly
2003 - Take Me, Take Me With You
2005 - The Stolen Heart
2006 - Blood Mask
Novel
1976 - The Triumph of the Spider Monkey
1990 - I Lock My Door Upon Myself
1991 - The Rise of Life on Earth
1992 - Black Water
1996 - First Love: A Gothic Tale
2002 - Beasts
2003 - Rape: A Love Story
2005 - The Corn Maiden : A Love Story
Drama
1974 - Miracle Play
1980 - Three Plays
1991 - In Darkest America
1991 - I Stand Before You Naked
1991 - Twelve Plays
1995 - The Perfectionist and Other Plays
1998 - New Plays
2004 - Dr. Magic: Six One Act Plays
Essays and criticism
1972 - The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature
1974 - The Hostile Sun: The Poetry of D.H. Lawrence
1974 - New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature
1981 - Contraries: Essays
1983 - The Profane Art: Essays & Reviews
1987 - On Boxing
1995 - George Bellows: American Artist
1995 - They Just Went Away
1999 - Where I've Been, And Where I'm Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose
2003 - The Faith of A Writer: Life, Craft, Art
2005 - Uncensored: Views
Poetry
1968 - Women In Love and Other Poems
1969 - Anonymous Sins & Other Poems
1970 - Love and Its Derangements
1973 - Angel Fire
1975 - The Fabulous Beasts
1978 - Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money
1982 - Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970-1982
1989 - The Time Traveler
1996 - Tenderness
Young adult fiction
2002 - Big Mouth & Ugly Girl
2003 - Small Avalanches and Other Stories
2003 - Freaky Green Eyes
2005 - Sexy
2006 - After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away
Children's fiction
1998 - Come Meet Muffin!
2003 - Where Is Little Reynard?
Writer
2006 - Small Avalanches
2006 - Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?
2003 - Små skred
2002 - We Were the Mulvaneys
2001 - Blonde
1999 - Getting to Know You
1998 - Waxwing
1996 - Foxfire
1991 - Lies of the Twins
1991 - Norman and the Killer
1985 - Smooth Talk
Appearances
2007 - HARDtalk Extra
2000-2001 - ESPN SportsCentury
1993 - Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson
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