
Let Me Tell You What I Mean

Of course my mother and father wanted me to be happy, and of course they expected that happiness would necessarily entail accomplishment, but the terms of that accomplishment were my affair.
Joan Didion • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
Do not misread me: I admire objectivity very much indeed, but I fail to see how it can be achieved if the reader does not understand the writer’s particular bias.
Joan Didion • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Joan Didion • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
I think it must be more difficult for children I know now, children whose lives from the age of two or three are a series of perilously programmed steps, each of which must be successfully negotiated in order to avoid just such a letter as mine from one or another of the Rixford K. Snyders of the world.
Joan Didion • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
Do not misread me: I admire objectivity very much indeed, but I fail to see how it can be achieved if the reader does not understand the writer’s particular bias.
Joan Didion • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of “feminine” domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.
Joan Didion • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
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
And of course none of it matters very much at all, none of these early successes, early failures.
Joan Didion • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one’s own words in print.