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.
Tags: you, daily, me, work

Other Quotes by "Joan Didion"

I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me.
Tags: not-interested, everyone, road, me
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.
Tags: bad, walk, you, good
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
Tags: afternoon, doing, late, sky
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.
Tags: style, time, me, myself
I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
Tags: pool, always, never, swimming
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