Quote

I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.

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
Control
Right
World
Typewriter
Typewriters
Tiny
Totally

More quotes by Joan Didion

Image
Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
Joan Didion
Image
For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
Joan Didion
Image
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
Joan Didion
Image
There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
Joan Didion
Image
Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
Joan Didion
Image
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
Joan Didion
Image
To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
Joan Didion
Image
I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.
Joan Didion
Image
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
Image
What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
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
Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
Joan Didion
Image
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
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
any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Joan Didion
Image
Information is control.
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
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
Joan Didion
Image
I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
Joan Didion
Image
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
Joan Didion