Joan Didion Want Quotations

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

If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.

On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.

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.

I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can't read it in one sitting, you're going to lose the rhythm of it. You're going to lose the shape of it.