Joyce Maynard Quotes

#1. A lot of your problem was in your head. You see yourself screwing up, it's going to happen.

Joyce Maynard

#2. 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.

Joyce Maynard

#3. She was in love with love.

Joyce Maynard

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

Joyce Maynard

#5. It's a great thing when a man knows how to dance, she said. When a man can dance, the world is his oyster.
Adele, Henry's Mother

Joyce Maynard

#6. 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.

Joyce Maynard

#7. Imagine if you succeeded in making the world perfect for your children what a shock the rest of life would be for them.

Joyce Maynard

#8. Before I had children I always wondered whether their births would be, for me, like the ultimate in gym class failures. And I discovered instead ... that I'd finally found my sport.

Joyce Maynard

#9. I continued to protect him with my silence.

Joyce Maynard

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

Joyce Maynard

#11. I've had some wonderful successes and some extreme disappointments in my career and my life.

Joyce Maynard

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

Joyce Maynard

#13. You write about what you know, and you write about what you want to know.

Joyce Maynard

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

Joyce Maynard

#15. I tried to think of what my father would tell me. 'Don't let any boy give you shit.' But he'd never said how we should go about preventing this.

Joyce Maynard

#16. 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!

Joyce Maynard

#17. It's like life: sometimes the littlest thing turns out to be the most important.

Joyce Maynard

#18. Some family's boat capsized at Lake Winnipesaukee the day before and now they were looking for the father's body.

Joyce Maynard

#19. It was as if I'd been in the middle of a book that I had to put down when I got too tired to keep reading, or a video put on pause. I wanted to pick back up with the story and find out what happened to the characters, except that the characters were us.

Joyce Maynard

#20. You like to think you can count on a person. To hang around

Joyce Maynard

#21. She never gave up adoring our father, but he ceased to be, for her, the larger-than-life hero I continued to make him into. For Patty, he was more like a deeply lovable spaniel who keeps peeing on the rug and chewing on the upholstery, no matter how many times you tell him not to.

Joyce Maynard

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

Joyce Maynard

#23. 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.

Joyce Maynard

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

Joyce Maynard

#25. I do not outline. There are writers I know and count as my friends who certainly do it the other way, but for me, part of the adventure is not knowing how it's going to turn out.

Joyce Maynard

#26. A person who deserves my loyalty receives it.

Joyce Maynard

#27. The word NO, carries a lot more meaning when spoken by a parent who also knows how to say yes.

Joyce Maynard

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

Joyce Maynard

#29. You lay your hand against his skin and just rib his back. Blow into his ear. Press that baby up against your own skin and walk outside with him, where the night air will sourround him, and moonlight fall on his face. Whistle, maybe. Dance. Hum. Pray.
(how to calm a crying baby)

Joyce Maynard

#30. No, I said. I didn't remember that. There was so much to remember, sometimes the best thing was to forget.

Joyce Maynard

#31. [On home births:] In a house where there had been three people, there were now four, although no one had come in the door.

Joyce Maynard

#32. For 25 years, I did take my responsibilities as a pleaser of others sufficiently seriously.

Joyce Maynard

#33. 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?

Joyce Maynard

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

Joyce Maynard

#35. Daughters," he told her as they dug. "Nothing better than a good daughter.

Joyce Maynard

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

Joyce Maynard

#37. There was a way of looking at the world where practically every single thing that happened had some kind of double meaning.

Joyce Maynard

#38. 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.

Joyce Maynard

#39. Every child, woman, and man should possess license to speak or sing in his or her true voice.

Joyce Maynard

#40. She felt everything too deeply, it was like the world was too much for her.

Joyce Maynard

#41. My mother didn't believe in germs but I did. Germs are something they made up to distract people from what they should really be worried about, she said. Germs are natural. It's the things people do you have to worry about.

Joyce Maynard

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

Joyce Maynard

#43. 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.

Joyce Maynard

#44. 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.

Joyce Maynard

#45. Tragedy and death would follow a person whereever he went in life. There was no such thing as escape, except maybe the kind that Mr. Kirby had accomplished ...

Joyce Maynard

#46. 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.

Joyce Maynard

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

Joyce Maynard

#48. 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.

Joyce Maynard

#49. There is a theme that runs through my work, and that is: the toxic property of keeping secrets.

Joyce Maynard

#50. 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.

Joyce Maynard

#51. The real drug, I came to believe, was love.

Joyce Maynard

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

Joyce Maynard

#53. One of the sad realities of being a parent is that the same stuff you know is exciting, educational, and enriching in your child'slife is often messy, smelly and exhausting to deal with.

Joyce Maynard

#54. If you act like something's too hard, it will be, he said. You got to believe it's possible.

Joyce Maynard

#55. 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.

Joyce Maynard

#56. I believe every one of us possesses a fundamental right to tell our own story.

Joyce Maynard

#57. Weary soldiers who went through a war together, side by

Joyce Maynard

#58. I had known there had been a serial killer on Mount Tamalpais, and it felt so incongruous in such a beautiful, peaceful spot.

Joyce Maynard

#59. 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.

Joyce Maynard

#60. Women writers have been told, forever, that our stories were not valuable. Not as valuable as men's stories about wars, business, power.

Joyce Maynard

#61. 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.

Joyce Maynard

#62. A good home must be made, not bought.

Joyce Maynard

#63. At Home in the World is the story of a young woman, raised in some difficult circumstances, and how she survives. It tells a story of redemption, not victimhood.

Joyce Maynard

#64. Ten years from now, her mother might not even recognize her. Already she was different, but the day would come when she'd be this person her mother had never seen. There would be other people - someone like Carolyn or Alan, or even Violet - who had known her longer than her mother ever did.

Joyce Maynard

#65. I have no doubt that over the years my children will find plenty of things about me to criticize. But something tells me that twenty years from now not one of them will sit on some therapist's couch complaining because their mother didn't spend enough time vacuuming up glitter.

Joyce Maynard

#66. 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.

Joyce Maynard

#67. I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama.

Joyce Maynard

#68. The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written, but to challenge my writing this story at all, speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval.

Joyce Maynard

#69. 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.

Joyce Maynard

#70. To share our stories is not only a worthwhile endeavor for the storyteller, but for those who hear our stories and feel less alone because of it.

Joyce Maynard

#71. 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?

Joyce Maynard

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

Joyce Maynard

#73. Love doesn't come and go when it's real. Love is supposed to be constant.

Joyce Maynard