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...
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.
finish good marriage school sentences thinking understand
I never had to finish sentences because he would finish them for me, ... I never got why. What was good for him was good for me. What was good for me was good for him. I don't understand what school of marriage they're thinking about.
simple thinking pieces
Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
thinking self mastery
The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.
writing thinking
We write to discover what we think.
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.
night thinking doors
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
writing thinking knows
I don't know what I think until I write it down.
thinking
We all survive more than we think we can,
memories thinking remember
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
mean writing thinking
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.
thinking land ownership
I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it.
dream new-york thinking
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
reading thinking sitting
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.