Joan Didion Quotes
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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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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 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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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.
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I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me.
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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.
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We imagine things - that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. We have no choice, so we do it.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense.
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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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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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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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I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance.
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.
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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.
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I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man's soul.
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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.
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Style is character.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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Call me the author.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.