Joan Didion Quotes
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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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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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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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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I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.
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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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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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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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Style is character.
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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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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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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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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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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 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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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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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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I lead a very conventional life.
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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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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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You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.