A Quote by Caitlin Flanagan
I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.
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When Nancy Reagan was newly the first lady of California, Joan Didion came and had an hour-long interview. She thought it went great, and then Joan Didion just eviscerated her in the most - possibly not inaccurate - but in the most devastating way.
A young female essayist saying they're influenced by Joan Didion is like a young female singer-songwriter saying they're influenced by Joni Mitchell.
I'm so old that when I started keeping a diary they were in actual books, and I think that's one the reasons that I've never written about sex. Because early on you had to worry that someone was going to find your diary, so it's bad enough to be writing like Joan Didion, but writing like Joan Didion about sex acts you'd performed with somebody you had known for 20 minutes, that's a bit worse. So I would write in my diary, "I met J. and we had sex five times last night." But I would never write about what we did.
Once, I got slaughtered after 'Blade Runner' by Pauline Kael: three pages of slaughter. I was so offended, I would never read any more press.
I love anything by Joan Didion. Incidentally, she was one of the local moms when I was growing up in Point Dume. She always reminded me a little bit of my mother, so I feel a great affinity. I love the precision of Didion's writing. There's a construction and a craftsmanship to her sentences that's imbued with so much emotion.
There is something so hopeful about a diary, a journal, a new notebook, which Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf both wrote about. A blog. Perhaps we all are waiting for someone to discover us.
The celebrated film critic Pauline Kael once wrote that movies function as escape pods, portals to parallel universes that can be radically different from emotional norms and societal conditioning of our own. What she meant was they parceled out freedom, allowing viewers to lose their selves in an effort to find greater connection to the self.
To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.
[Jerome David] Salinger was really taken to the cleaners by nasty critics in his day. I think Joan Didion was one of the people who attacked him in a very unfair way.
Pauline Kael said that Rip Torn could get angrier faster than any other American actor: that he could go from zero to 10 in 1.8 seconds or something like that.
In the spring of 1988, my wife, Joan Didion, and I were approached about writing a screenplay based on a book by Alanna Nash called 'Golden Girl,' a biography of the late network correspondent and anchorwoman Jessica Savitch.
My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers - Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Christa Wolf - and much of this writing was political as well as literary.
"Influence" is itself influenced, coming from an Italian word for the outbreak of a disease (influenza, outbreak). Influence is that which flows across - permeates - the boundaries of the self.
I tried to fortify myself with the best nonfiction and fiction I could lay my hands on, from the essays of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to the stories and novels of Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolano and Celine. Distinctive voices like these were a source of constant nourishment on all range of matters, from punctuation to philosophy.
There are stylists I really love. I'm a huge Joan Didion fan - if I wrote something that she might like, then I'd feel very proud. I want the action to move as quickly as it does in A Book of Common Prayer, where one thing bonks right into another very quickly.
I have always identified with Joan Didion's depiction of Los Angeles and Southern California, ever since reading 'Play It As It Lays,' 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' and 'The White Album.'
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