Joan Didion Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von 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.

Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.

Joan Didion

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

Joan Didion

Call me the author.

Joan Didion

Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.

Joan Didion

You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.

Joan Didion

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

Joan Didion

My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.

Joan Didion

There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.

Joan Didion

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

Joan Didion

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

Joan Didion

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Joan Didion

Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't.

Joan Didion

I lead a very conventional life.

Joan Didion

You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

Joan Didion

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

Joan Didion

Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.

Joan Didion

Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.

Joan Didion

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

Joan Didion

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?

Joan Didion

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

I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.

Joan Didion

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.

Joan Didion

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

Joan Didion

You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.

Joan Didion

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

Joan Didion

Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.

Joan Didion

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

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Joan Didion

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

We imagine things - that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. We have no choice, so we do it.

Joan Didion

It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.

Joan Didion

To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.

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

Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.

Joan Didion