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.

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

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

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.

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.

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