#tin

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. ↗

— Eugene O'Neill

#actually #before #getting #getting old #haven

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. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#being #boxing #devastating #feeling #hit

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. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#continuing #deranged #feel #feeling #i

As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I'd put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn't actually know how to write. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#adult #bottom #chickens #child #did

As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#good #hard #i #just #make

Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#conversational #criticism #essay #even #fiction

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#faulkner #hemingway #high #high school #i

If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#committed #disappointing #effort #form #good

If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line; frequently these days, while on the phone having been 'put on hold.' ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#been #cold #cold weather #comfortable #days

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#ask #disingenuous #filled #history #seems