Jenny Offill Quotes

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

There's no retirement for an artist,its your way of living so theres no end to it.

I do have the freedom to choose what I want to do and I'll continue to do that.

I have made the choices that work best for me. I know I cannot please everyone, and that's fine.

I think people should be able to do what they want to do.

No one makes me do anything I don't want to do.

Either you can do what others want, or you can do what you want to do. That's an easy call.

I think I've claimed the right to be any version of me that I want to be.

I'm my own person. You can't generalise about people.

My art form is my child, and that's what I give my focus to.

There's nothing, nobody can pay me enough money and nobody can do enough for me to wear something I don't want.

There's this idea of bankers retiring and painting watercolours. You can't dabble in art - it's a life. Being a writer, an artist... is a whole life.

You just gotta live your life and do it your way.

I am not defined to be in any mould and I can be whatever I want to be.

I never wanted to be married. That was never a thing for me.

I firmly believe in individual liberty more than anything else. And that you have to live the life you want for yourself.

There's an individual feminism, if you will, that you make your own choices.

You don't have to live anybody else's story.

You just have to work really hard and throw everything into it. ... It's really hard to be an artist, and even if you do work really hard, there's no guarantee about anything. There's no advice you can give someone that things will somehow work out, but you can talk to people about how they can make art a big part of their life.

Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. But we really do lead almost a monastic life, you know; to follow it you very often have to give up something.

I've lived a life that's full, I traveled each and ev'ry highway, And more, much more than this, I did it my way.

Might I have had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if she would have had me.

It is not from choice that my life is music and nothing more, but when one is an artist what else can he be? When a whole lifetime is too short to attain the heights he wants to reach, how then can he devote any of the little time he has to things outside of his art?

A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own.

Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself.