Joan Didion Quotes
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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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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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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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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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 lead a very conventional life.
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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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Style is character.
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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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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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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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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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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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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To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.
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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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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.