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...
except hardly thank
There's hardly anything I can say about this except thank you,
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.
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.
generosity needs messages
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
marine sea maps
I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
locked-doors lost stills
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
complaining more-time alone-time
Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.
grieving missing world
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
block different fiction
I didn't like the computer when I first began using it. Where it's helped me a lot is in non-fiction which is a kind of different process. You've got research, you've got your notes. You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape.
ifs-and you-like-it pleasure
It's just a deep pleasure to read something you've written yourself - if and when you like it.
typewriters tiny world
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
vacuums reader ifs
If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
blessed mean writing
Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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.
summer writing self-love
I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write.