Joyce Carol Oates

"All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later."

"Boxing has become America's tragic theater."

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

"For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth."

"I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it."

"If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?"

"Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light."

"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."

"The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way."

"To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it."