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. Joan Didion More Quotes by Joan Didion More Quotes From Joan Didion We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living. Joan Didion done should fun To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home. Joan Didion home running lying I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose. Joan Didion boxes real way As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear. Joan Didion growing-up rain fall What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask. Joan Didion lays evil people ...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. Joan Didion twilight new-york spring The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Joan Didion land looks past Memories are what you no longer want to remember. Joan Didion want remember memories My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular. Joan Didion spectacular fantasy would-be 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. Joan Didion feels I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction. Joan Didion nonfiction voice fiction I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am. Joan Didion packs turns rats You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that. Joan Didion sparrows eye feels 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. Joan Didion analysis angel mind I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else. Joan Didion abandoned adoption problem 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. Joan Didion moral want-something thinking 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. Joan Didion twelve talking people 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. Joan Didion powerful reading book It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young. Joan Didion cities new-york somewhere-else We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience. Joan Didion narrative lines order
