The Essential Joan Didion
the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.
Joan Didion • The White Album: Essays
Character,” Joan Didion would write in one of her best essays, “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”
Stephen Hanselman • The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
It is a comment on our press conventions that we are considered “well-informed” to precisely the extent that we know “the real story,” the story not in the newspaper.
Joan Didion • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write e... See more
Joan Didion • Joan Didion: Why I Write
The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one’s own words in print.
Joan Didion • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
I’m talking about trying not to be crippled by ideas; I’m talking about looking out, about looking out at the world and trying to see it straight, about making that effort to look out for the whole rest of your life.