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“Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Address at Mount Holyoke College (2006)

“In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women… The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: "the contemplation of ruins," Erikson observes, "is a masculine specialty."”

Joyce Carol Oates

On Boxing (1987)

“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

New York Times (27 July 1980)

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

"In the Founders’ Room," Unholy Loves (1979)

“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?”

Joyce Carol Oates book You Must Remember This

You Must Remember This (1987), pt. 1, ch. 13

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Interview in The Guardian (18 August 1989)

“It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Address at Mount Holyoke College (2006)

“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!”

Joyce Carol Oates book You Must Remember This

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?
You Must Remember This (1987), pt. 1, ch. 13