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...
character writing thinking
Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
spring character responsibility
People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.
character ideas talking
I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.
book character talking
Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character "X." I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.
character want complicated
You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
assumed husband overcome shock
The shock of it was that this time, she had a lot of strength, ... Her husband and I assumed she'd overcome it.
happens people
This one is really fantastic, ... It's not about grieving. It's about what happens when people die.
except hardly thank
There's hardly anything I can say about this except thank you,
free lies power singular
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
bad deceiving heard hysteria imperative join moral morality necessity ourselves pragmatic start thinking whine
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.
changes dinner life sit
Life changes fast, ... Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
action dread escaping feared generation official optimism others seemed shared silent social
We were that generation called ''silent,'' but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.
argument begin bridge further occurred step taking
That's something we have to feel out. It occurred to me to begin with, as a way of taking it a step further, but there's another argument that the step further may be a bridge too far.
last selling somebody writers
That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out