Joan Didion Quotes
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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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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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Style is character.
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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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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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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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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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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I lead a very conventional life.
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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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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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.