Joan Didion Quotes
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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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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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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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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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Nothing is critic-proof.
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You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.
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One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.
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I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.
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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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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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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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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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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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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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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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Style is character.