Joan Didion Quotes
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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
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All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.
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Nothing is critic-proof.
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You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.
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I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.
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When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal.
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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.
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It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.
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Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
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My mother 'gave teas' the way other mothers breathed. Her own mother 'gave teas.' All of their friends 'gave teas,' each involving butter cookies extruded from a metal press and pastel bonbons ordered from See's.
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Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
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Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
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Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.
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The truth is, it's easier for me to write than talk... to express the state I'm in at any time.
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Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't.
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The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.