Posts tagged Joan Didion

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
Joan Didion; Essays & Conversations
apoetreflects: “What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it.  Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence.  And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.” —Joan Didion

apoetreflects:

“What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it.  Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence.  And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.”

—Joan Didion

“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.” —Joan Didion

“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.” —Joan Didion

thisrecording: The most important is that I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes. When I’m really working I don’t like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour.

thisrecording:

The most important is that I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes. When I’m really working I don’t like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour.

thisrecording

vintageanchor: “Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.” —Joan Didion

vintageanchor:

“Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.”
—Joan Didion
vintageanchor: “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon the disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” — Joan Didion

vintageanchor:

“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon the disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
— Joan Didion

vintageanchorbooks

vintageanchor: “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 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.” —Joan Didion

vintageanchor:

“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 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”
—Joan Didion
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

vintageanchor: “Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power. “ —Joan Didion

vintageanchor:

“Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power. “

—Joan Didion

That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.

Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”

This essay never, ever gets old.

(via amywhipple)