Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
Joyce Carol OatesThat is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?
Joyce Carol OatesThe relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.
Joyce Carol OatesArt is a means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least temporarily, the ravages of homesickness. To speak of 'what is past, or passing or to come'-in the most meticulous language thereby to assure its permanence; to honor those we've loved and learned from and must outlive.
Joyce Carol Oates