Quote

My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.

Joan Didion

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Tended
Fantasies
Spectacular
Fantasy
Would
Life
Like

More quotes by Joan Didion

Image
I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
Joan Didion
Image
Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
Joan Didion
Image
I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction 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
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
There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
Joan Didion
Image
You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.
Joan Didion
Image
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
Joan Didion
Image
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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
I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
Joan Didion
Image
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
Image
Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
Joan Didion
Image
There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
Joan Didion
Image
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Joan Didion
Image
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
Joan Didion
Image
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
Image
I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
Joan Didion
Image
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Joan Didion
Image
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
Joan Didion
Image
I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
Joan Didion