Joan Didion Quotes
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The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black.
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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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I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.
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To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.
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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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Nothing is critic-proof.
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I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.
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The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
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Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.
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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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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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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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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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You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.
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I was raised an Episcopalian. And I did not and I don't believe that anyone is looking out for me personally.
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I can remember, when I was in college, irritating deeply somebody I was going out with, because he would ask me what I was thinking and I would say I was thinking nothing. And it was true.
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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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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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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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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 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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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.