Joan Didion Zitate auf Englisch

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I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

Joan Didion

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

Joan Didion

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

Joan Didion

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

Joan Didion

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Joan Didion

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.

Joan Didion

I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.

Joan Didion

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

The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

Joan Didion

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

Joan Didion

Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.

Joan Didion

In many ways, writing is the act of saying 'I,' of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, 'Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.' It's an aggressive, even a hostile act.

Joan Didion

Style is character.

Joan Didion

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Joan Didion

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.

Joan Didion

It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade.

Joan Didion

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

Nothing is critic-proof.

Joan Didion

I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

Joan Didion

I couldn't give away my husband's shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes - I don't know what it was about the shoes, but a lot of people have mentioned to me that shoes took on more meaning than we generally think they do... their attachment to the ground, I don't know - but that did have a real resonance for me.

Joan Didion

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

Joan Didion

Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.

Joan Didion

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

One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense.

Joan Didion

When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal.

Joan Didion

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