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[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
Joan Didion
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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Evidence
Notwithstanding
Happened
Mixed
Three
Blessings
Ever
Twenty
Nothing
Twenties
Even
Conviction
Like
Contrary
Blessing
More quotes by Joan Didion
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
Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
Joan Didion
Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
Joan Didion
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
Joan Didion
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
Joan Didion
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
Joan Didion
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
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
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
Joan Didion
Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Joan Didion
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
You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
Joan Didion
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
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
Joan Didion
Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
Joan Didion
The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
Joan Didion
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Joan Didion
If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
Joan Didion
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Joan Didion
