Joan Didion Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.

  Joan Didion

  Book, Night, Blue

  Joan Didion (2011). “Blue Nights”, p.4, Vintage

• 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

  Book, Pages, Rhythm

  "Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1". Interview by Hilton Als, theparisreview.org. January 27, 2017.

• Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

  Joan Didion

  Book, Sleep, Rooms

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Oct 15, 2011

• When I am near the end of a book, I have to sleep in the same room with it.

  Joan Didion

  Book, Sleep, Rooms

• Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character "X." I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.

  Joan Didion

  Book, Character, Talking

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Dec 09, 2012

• I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point. After a while I arrive at an accommodation: Well, it's not the ideal, it's not the perfect object I wanted to make, but maybe—if I go ahead and finish it anyway—I can get it right next time. Maybe I can have another chance.

  Joan Didion

  Hate, Book, Color

• It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.

  Joan Didion

  Book, Writing, Dark

  Source: www.believermag.com

• 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

  Powerful, Book, Reading

• I just read everything I could get my hands on. I taught myself to read or my mother taught me. Who knows how I learned to read? It was before I went to school, so I would go to the library and just take things off the shelf. My mother had to sign a piece of paper saying I could take adult books.

  Joan Didion

  Mother, Book, School

  Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

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