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To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.
Joan Didion -
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.
Joan Didion
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
Joan Didion -
You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.
Joan Didion -
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.
Joan Didion -
I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.
Joan Didion -
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.
Joan Didion -
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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion -
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.
Joan Didion -
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
Joan Didion -
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.
Joan Didion -
Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
Joan Didion -
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.
Joan Didion
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
Joan Didion -
The truth is, it's easier for me to write than talk... to express the state I'm in at any time.
Joan Didion -
It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade.
Joan Didion -
Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
Joan Didion -
It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.
Joan Didion -
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Joan Didion
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion -
You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.
Joan Didion -
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.
Joan Didion -
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.
Joan Didion