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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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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Nothing is critic-proof.
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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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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.
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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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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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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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You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.
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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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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
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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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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 it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.