"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."
"Jack Kerouac did what he most wanted to do. He wrote great prose. He became the writer he wanted to be."
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More quotes by Joyce Johnson
"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."