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...
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.
witness wanted
I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
thinking want-something moral
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
memories want remember
Memories are what you no longer want to remember.
want facts fractions
We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.
writing thinking want
On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.
underwater way wanted
I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
writing thinking want
If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.
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.