Joan Didion quotes - page 4

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream. (Joan Didion)
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter. View quote
Joan Didion
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power. View quote
Joan Didion
Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that. View quote
Joan Didion
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers. View quote
Joan Didion
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. View quote
Joan Didion
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting. View quote
Joan Didion
I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing. View quote
Joan Didion
I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. View quote
Joan Didion
My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular. View quote
Joan Didion
I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction. (Joan Didion)
I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am. View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
Joan Didion
We imagine things - that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it. View quote
Joan Didion
To believe in'the greater good' isto operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension. View quote
Joan Didion
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way. View quote
Joan Didion
The wind shows us how close to the edge we are. View quote
Joan Didion
You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever. View quote
Joan Didion
Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting. View quote
Joan Didion
One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense. (Joan Didion)
Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it. View quote
Joan Didion
Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful. View quote
Joan Didion
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything. View quote
Joan Didion
Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins. View quote
Joan Didion