Top 25 Joyce Maynard Quotes

A person who deserves my loyalty receives it.

I compromised my ability to tell my story, at the most basic level.

I continued to protect him with my silence.

Teach a child to play solitaire, and she‘ll be able to entertain herself when there’s no one around. Teach her tennis, and she’ll know what to do when she’s on a court. But raise her to feel comfortable in nature, and the whole planet is her home.

The process of writing has always started for me when I put myself in a place where no one distracts me.

The silence was part of the story I wanted to tell.

It’s not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can’t tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.

One life is not enough for me. I want to go lots of places.

I was giving a speech one time, and the woman who introduced me said, ‘Well, she used to be J. D. Salinger’s girlfriend. I thought, ‘God, is that all I’ve been?’ I didn’t want to be reduced to that.

The big dramas that fascinate me are the quiet ones that happen behind closed doors in so-called ordinary families.

If a man wishes to truly not be written about, he would do well not to write letters to 18-year-old girls, inviting them into his life.

When people ask what I write about, that’s what I tell them: ‘The drama of human relationships.’ I’m not even close to running out of material.

More than any other setting – more than battlefields or boardrooms or a spaceship headed for intergalactic travel – I’ll put my money on the family to provide an endless source of comedy, tragedy and intrigue.

Not only did I avoid speaking of Salinger; I resisted thinking about him. I did not reread his letters to me. The experience had been too painful.

Those who rhapsodize about the ease and joy of childhood have perhaps forgotten what it’s like to be 12 years old.

Many women my age have known the experience of giving up crucial parts of themselves to please the man they love.

My job is writing. I get paid to do it. When was the last time you heard someone challenge a doctor for making money off of cancer?

Nothing like being visible, publishing one’s work, and speaking openly about one’s life, to disabuse the world of the illusion of one’s perfection and purity.

Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I can only remember knowing one child, ever, whose parents got a divorce, and hardly any whose mother ‘worked‘ at anything besides raising her children.

It troubles me that people speak about writing for money as ugly and distasteful.

It is not the task of a reader to please her subjects.

If I told you about all the stories I don’t tell, I would be violating the very boundaries I set for myself.

Long after Salinger sent me away, I continued to believe his standards and expectations were the best ones.

The portrait of my parents is a complicated one, but lovingly drawn.

The painter who feels obligated to depict his subjects as uniformly beautiful or handsome and without flaws will fall short of making art.