[In her devastating new book,] The Year of Magical Thinking, ... cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

Joan Didion

Joan Didion

Related Quotes

The Year of Magical Thinking,

— Joan Didion

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.

— Joan Didion

DeceivingFashionableImperative

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

BusinessDailyDay

Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.

— Joan Didion

AlwaysFailedFirst

I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.

— Joan Didion

AgainAnybodyFeels