‘In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind,’ Joan Didion wrote in the essay ‘Why I Write,’ first published in the New York Times Book Review (December 5, 1976). ‘It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions— with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but 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.’ – Joan Didion Chronicle, a message from Griffin Dunne and Susanne Rostock about The Joan Didion Documentary
Toen ik de regels kopieerde, dacht ik, deze woorden komen me bekend voor. En ja, op 13 december 2009 citeerde ik dezelfde zinnen, overgenomen uit een essaybundel van Zadie Smith.