Joan Didion
Joan Didion
Joan Didionis an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work...
thinking irritation people
I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
texture painting novel
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.
adventure lasts pieces
The last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up.
crazy grief thinking
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.
thinking water might
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
choices able facts
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.
thinking people parent
I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
mirrors ideas flawless
Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.
dream listening reader
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
order lines narrative
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.
memories want remember
Memories are what you no longer want to remember.
firsts nonfiction pieces
Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.
powerful book reading
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.
growing-up fall taken
As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.