Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

Drama lives on conflict. If you're trying to deal with social issues seriously, there's no way of avoiding violence, which is so present in society.

I don't know if it matters what country you're from, size of the city you're from, urban or rural, there are people that are hurting each other everywhere.

It's a violent world we live in. I don't agree with trying to hide that or cover it up.

There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death. Whether it's the mundane violence we do to our bodies by overeating toxic food or drink or the extreme violence of child abuse, domestic warfare, life-threatening poverty, addiction, or state terrorism.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

We can and must turn this around. If you're going to kill someone just pull the trigger.

Violence is very much with us, and we like to see it. I doubt if you can change that, and I'm not sure you should want to. I have occasionally been very upset by something I was writing, but it's quite rare: I keep my writing very separate from my life.

Never mind a world that can't see past brutality.

The world is too violent right now.

The women who inspired this play deserved to be smacked across the head with a meat ax and that, I flatter myself, is exactly what I smacked them with.

At 17, the first time I saw a dead body, I froze. By 31 it was a natural occurrence for me, and no group of people should live like that.

Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that.

It's such a tragedy that man endures in killing his brother and his own kind, putting him in jail and insane asylums, letting him lay out in the street.

I come from a place where there's violence and inarticulacy. I worked in a pub from the age of 12 or 13. I used to see people smashing glasses over each other. I was never tough. I was scared of them.

The real war will never get in the books.

I wonder why he shot me?.

I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations.

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

Violence is not funny.

I don't want to live in a fantasy world.

Men who have been raised violently have every reason to believe it is appropriate for them to control others through violence; they feel no compunction over being violent to women, children, and one another.

Violence ravaged my life. I was a victim of hatred, and I have dedicated my life to reversing that hatred.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

Where I'm from, they'll beat your head until it gets back down to normal size.