![]() ![]() I may have other interests: I am “interested,” for example, in marine biology, but I don't flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I can bring you no reports from any other front. Like many writers I have only this one “subject,” this one “area”: the act of writing. I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a nononsense way, all I have to tell you. can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than statingbut there's no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space. This is adapted from a Regents’ Lecture delivered by the author at the University of California at Berkeley. Joan Didion is the author of two novels, “Run River” and “Play It as It Lays,” and a book of essays, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” Her new novel, “A Book of Common Prayer,” will be published In March. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this: One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write Continued from. Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. ![]()
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