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...
reading simple twelve
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.
writing thinking knows
I don't know what I think until I write it down.
heart details leap
Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere
thinking
We all survive more than we think we can,
grieving missing world
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
jealousy self cures
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
blessed writing mind
Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.
two flow firsts
What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
writing typewriters use
I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
book night blue
This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.
locked-doors lost stills
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
music power play
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
writing looks may
When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
piano play ears
Grammar is a piano I play by ear.