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...
block different fiction
I didn't like the computer when I first began using it. Where it's helped me a lot is in non-fiction which is a kind of different process. You've got research, you've got your notes. You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape.
respect self anything-worth-having
Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
running loss sky
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
distance grief eye
Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
world stage stuck
Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
wind shows edges
The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
book pages rhythm
When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
america secret desire
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake... but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.
want sitting shapes
I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can't read it in one sitting, you're going to lose the rhythm of it. You're going to lose the shape of it.
dream listening want
Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
writing answers novel
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
blessed mean writing
Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
summer writing self-love
I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write.
notebook lonely children
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.