Joan Didion Quotes - Page 7

Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

The last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

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.

Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.

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

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.

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.

I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible

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.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it

I have not been the witness I wanted to be.

It's just a deep pleasure to read something you've written yourself - if and when you like it.

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.

New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.

I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.

prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it ' ... There was something arresting about the matter-of-fact wisdom here, the instinctive understanding of the physiological disruptions... I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.