If you want to do creative work, there are tremendous sacrifices involved, and tremendous financial sacrifices too. It requires dedication and solitude.

A lot of artists don't survive, do they? You work very hard and finally you get what you want and it destroys you.

I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him-they were part of his “road,” the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work.

If time were like a passage of music, you could keep going back to it until you got it right.

Rebels defy the rules of society, risking everything to retain their humanity. If the world Atwood depicts is chilling, if 'God is losing,' the only hope for optimism is a vision that includes the inevitability of human struggle against the prevailing order.

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

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