A Quote by Joan Didion

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion

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Actual Entirely Experience Freeze Ideas Images Imposition Learned Line Live Narrative Our Shifting Which Writers

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Joan Didion
American - Author
Born: December 5, 1934

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

Joan Didion

The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere.

Sheena Iyengar

I am interested in what I term gestalts; picture circumstances which bring together disparate images or ideas so as to form new meanings and new configurations.

Robert Heinecken

Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem!

Carolyn Kizer

The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.

Joshua Foer

Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?--and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

Curtis Sittenfeld

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.

Carl Jung

Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in which we perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.

Jason Silva

The media we surround ourselves with allows us to manufacture our own experience every day, which is a perception of the world that is our own invention entirely, whether it is on social media or what we choose to absorb. This was very different when I was a kid, like generations before us we were exposed to things that were not entirely on our terms. We had to wrestle with and find the relationship with the world around you. It was literal experience, unlike the form of protracted psychic masturbation that is the digital world we live in.

Rick Alverson

Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind.

James Rosenquist

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt.

Audre Lorde

We write out of our humanity by writing through our direct experience. That which is most personal is most general, which becomes both our insight and protection as a writers. This is our authority as women, as human beings.

Terry Tempest Williams

Sometimes I see my students, especially the ones with a gift for the lyrical, reaching far outside the realm of their own experience for language and images. I understand this impulse. We think, in the beginning, that striking exotic words together will create something entirely new. That we must be worldly in our vocabulary. We idolize the styles of other writers and don't trust or perhaps yet know our own.

Melissa Febos

Divine symbols which have been given to mankind from time to time speak to that forum of truth which is within our hearts, and waken our consciousness to divine ideas entirely beyond words.

Max Heindel

A Quote by Joan Didion

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