Joyce Johnson Quotes

I'd learned myself by the age of sixteen that just as girls guarded their virginity, boys guarded something less tangible which they called Themselves.

Nothing ever happened except God.

I believe in the curative powers of love as the English believe in tea or Catholics believe in the Miracle of Lourdes.

media saturation is probably very destructive to art. New movements get overexposed and exhausted before they have a chance to grow, and they turn to ashes in a short time. Some degree of time and obscurity is often very necessary to artists.

If time were like a passage of music, you could keep going back to it until you got it right.

Everyone knew in the 1950s why a girl from a nice family left home. The meaning of her theft of herself from her parents was clear to all - as well as what she'd be up to in that room of her own.

Legend adheres to artists whose deaths seem the corollaries of their works.

We tend to make up the people we fall in love with

Rebels defy the rules of society, risking everything to retain their humanity. If the world Atwood depicts is chilling, if 'God is losing,' the only hope for optimism is a vision that includes the inevitability of human struggle against the prevailing order.

What if you lived your entire life completely without urgency? You went to classes, you ate your meals, on Saturday nights a boy you didn't love took you to the movies; now and then you actually had a conversation with someone. The rest of the time -the hours that weren't accounted for-you spent waiting for something to happen to you; when you were particularly desperate, you went out looking for it.

We derive a lot of the reality of ourselves through interactions with others.

Sacrificing everything for one's craft is something some people can't help. They can't help themselves. They must do it. They're driven to do it.

A lot of artists don't survive, do they? You work very hard and finally you get what you want and it destroys you.

Jack Kerouac seems to have been preoccupied with the question of duality from a very young age. He seemed to feel that there was more than one person inside him. Indeed he would veer from friendly, open and so on to someone who was angry. In a way, there was a swing also between his American self and what he later called his Franco-American older brother. There was a swing between the deeply introverted part of himself and the person he became out in the world, having to act in an extroverted way.

If you want to do creative work, there are tremendous sacrifices involved, and tremendous financial sacrifices too. It requires dedication and solitude.

Fame and success put tremendous demands on people. It robs them of their necessary privacy and anonymity. That's hard for even healthy people to deal with.

I think even celebrities deserve their privacy. I really do. It's sort of a hideous spectacle, the public feeding on all this information.

I think art, the discipline of creating, really does require tremendous solitude. But the whole creative process can seal your life to such an extent that while you're creating, you feel very self-sufficient. I've certainly experienced that.

Jack Kerouac did what he most wanted to do. He wrote great prose. He became the writer he wanted to be.

I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him-they were part of his “road,” the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work.

I became intent on saving him through showing him that he was loved.