Quote

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

Joan Didion

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Thought
Find
Writing
Dreaming
Dream

More quotes by Joan Didion

Image
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
Image
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.
Joan Didion
Image
Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
Joan Didion
Image
I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
Joan Didion
Image
Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
Joan Didion
Image
I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
Joan Didion
Image
I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
Joan Didion
Image
Writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion
Image
My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
Joan Didion
Image
Anything worth having has its price.
Joan Didion
Image
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
Joan Didion
Image
I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
Joan Didion
Image
I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
Image
Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
Joan Didion
Image
I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
Joan Didion
Image
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
Image
I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
Joan Didion
Image
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
Image
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion
Image
On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
Joan Didion