Quotes About Joan Didion

The bookshelves were lined with Joan Didion and Flannery O'Connor, a small, unexpected collection of musicalia, essay collections on Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. There was a framed poster of an exhibit of romantic landscape paintings in Dresden. Intellectuals had their own thing going, that was for sure.

I love anything by Joan Didion. Incidentally, she was one of the local moms when I was growing up in Point Dume. She always reminded me a little bit of my mother, so I feel a great affinity. I love the precision of Didion's writing. There's a construction and a craftsmanship to her sentences that's imbued with so much emotion.

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.

Male novelists were granted a 'social tradition' in which to operate, Didion discovered 'hard drinkers, bad livers, wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts.

In the spring of 1988, my wife, Joan Didion, and I were approached about writing a screenplay based on a book by Alanna Nash called 'Golden Girl,' a biography of the late network correspondent and anchorwoman Jessica Savitch.

And in the outer islands she found, I think, a Hawaii more to her liking—not the Babbitty boosters and country-club racists of Honolulu. In snapshots from those jaunts, she looked like a stranger: not Mom but some pensive, stylish lady in a sleeveless turquoise shift, alone with her thoughts in the middle distance—a Joan Didion character, it seems now, walking barefoot, sandals in hand, past a shaggy wall of shorefront pines. Didion, I later learned, was her favorite writer.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

I offer you a second way of approaching the moment where everything in your life just stops, this one from the actor Robert Duvall: I exist very nicely between the words 'action' and 'cut.' And even a third way: It doesn't present as pain, I once heard an oncological surgeon say of cancer.

You're a professional. Finish the piece. It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

Madness, it became convenient to believe quite early on, came with the territory, on the order of earthquakes.

Her choices, all. Sentimental choices, things she remembered. I remembered them too.

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.

It came to her that in the scenario of her life this would be what was called an obligatory scene, and she wondered with distant interest just how long the scene would play.

Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was "This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy." That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one's memory.

When I try to reconstruct those weeks at UCLA I recognize the mudginess in my own memory. There are parts of days that seem very clear and parts of days that do not.

One question: would you have called buying pastel linen dresses for Saigon a mark of 'privilege'? Or would you have called it more a mark of bone stupidity?

see the question now as the equivalent of a cry of helpless rage, another way of saying How could this have happened when everything was normal.

Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings.

anise tea. "Meditation turns us on," Sandy says. He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers.

They worry a great deal about 'responding to one another with beauty and tenderness,' and their response to one another is in fact so tender that an afternoon at the school tends to drift perilously into the never-ever.

I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.

Everybody says I'm politically naive, and I am," she says after a while. It is something she says frequently to people she does not know. "So are the people running politics, or we wouldn't be in wars, would we.