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...
life dinner ends
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
writing journalism selling
Writers are always selling somebody out.
sometimes accomplish ifs
I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything every day, but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day.
respect lying self
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
appreciate people alcohol
I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
past genealogy seeds
The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.
writing color water
When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color.
dream writing
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
literature information working-it
Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.
running people forget
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.
love forever shapes
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
commitment powerful-women walks
You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.
notebook daughter lonely
Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
typewriters tiny world
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.