I don’t really get things very… intuitively. I mean, I don’t immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down. Joan Didion Read Quote
I can remember, when I was in college, irritating deeply somebody I was going out with, because he would ask me what I was thinking and I would say I was thinking nothing. And it was true. Joan Didion Read Quote
A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions – leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways – those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California. Joan Didion Read Quote
Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another. Joan Didion Read Quote
Not many people were speaking truth to power in the ’80s. I had a really good time doing it – I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It’s challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing ‘Democracy’ particularly. Joan Didion Read Quote
It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent. Joan Didion Read Quote
Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up. Joan Didion Read Quote
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. Joan Didion Read Quote
