Words matter. These are the best Joyce Maynard Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I believed my story would be helpful to young women my daughter’s age, who are still in the process of forming themselves as women, and in need of encouragement to remain true to themselves.
The big dramas that fascinate me are the quiet ones that happen behind closed doors in so-called ordinary families.
A good home must be made, not bought. In the end, it’s not track lighting or a sun room that brings light into a kitchen.
Those who rhapsodize about the ease and joy of childhood have perhaps forgotten what it’s like to be 12 years old.
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.
There is a theme that runs through my work, and that is: the toxic property of keeping secrets.
I believe every one of us possesses a fundamental right to tell our own story.
You write about what you know, and you write about what you want to know.
If I told you about all the stories I don’t tell, I would be violating the very boundaries I set for myself.
It is not the task of a reader to please her subjects.
One life is not enough for me. I want to go lots of places.
Although Salinger had long since cut me out of his life completely and made it plain that he had nothing but contempt for me, the thought of becoming the object of his wrath was more than I felt ready to take on.
If people choose to live their life in a way that does not confront the more troubling aspects of their experience, that’s fine, if it works for them. But it will probably make them uncomfortable if they come up against somebody like me. So they just shouldn’t! They shouldn’t read my work!
Women writers have been told, forever, that our stories were not valuable. Not as valuable as men’s stories about wars, business, power.
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.
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.
I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama.
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.
I wonder what it is that the people who criticize me for telling this story truly object to: is it that I have dared to tell the story? Or that the story turns out not to be the one they wanted to hear?
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.
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.
Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals.
I have long observed that the act of writing is viewed, by some, as an elite and otherworldly act, all the more so if a person isn’t paid for what she writes.
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.
I’ve had some wonderful successes and some extreme disappointments in my career and my life.
The portrait of my parents is a complicated one, but lovingly drawn.
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?
For 25 years, I did take my responsibilities as a pleaser of others sufficiently seriously.
A person who deserves my loyalty receives it.
Long after Salinger sent me away, I continued to believe his standards and expectations were the best ones.
I continued to protect him with my silence.
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 painter who feels obligated to depict his subjects as uniformly beautiful or handsome and without flaws will fall short of making art.
