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...
writing thinking want
On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.
There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
thinking people mind
The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can "drive" on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participation requires total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.
men dying left
Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
mourning limits
Mourning has its place but also its limits.
done want way
In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
beautiful las-vegas devotion
Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
grief turns knows
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.
landscape nostalgia homesick
There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
underwater way wanted
I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
hands shoulders salute
Hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back.
character ideas talking
I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.
spring america people
It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.
writing feels
There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.