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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
Joan Didion
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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
World
Screens
Stuck
Stage
Known
Anything
Whole
Something
Literal
Always
Screen
More quotes by Joan Didion
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
Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
I think 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 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
Joan Didion
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
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
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
I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
Joan Didion
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
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
Joan Didion
Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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
Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
Joan Didion
Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
Joan Didion
I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
Joan Didion
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
California: The west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
Joan Didion
Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
Joan Didion
When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
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
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
