#ow

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power. ↗

— Joan Didion

#ear #grammar #i #know #piano

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 #constantly #day #every #every day

Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power. ↗

— Joan Didion

#because #difficult #europeans #guilty #materialistic

It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade. ↗

— Joan Didion

#after #anyway #before #begun #berkeley

Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing. ↗

— Joan Didion

#down #every #go #like #novels

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting. ↗

— Joan Didion

#aim #always #course #how #i

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up. ↗

— Joan Didion

#daily #day #different #down #dread

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

#another #antithetical #because #book #down

Admittedly, it is really our duty, as artists, to hold up a mirror to our own era; but, on the other hand, these works have lives of their own, and they're still alive today. ↗

— Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

#alive #artists #duty #era #hand

How often do the poor daydream of a better life? Plenty, no doubt, and where does it get them? It is the poor who begin with a daydream and realize at some point that they have to get up, roll their sleeves, and start doing something about those day dreams who succeed. And there are many who have. ↗

— Stephen Richards

#mind-power #poverty #stephen-richards #wealth-creation #dreams