Tricking the reader - Didion

Love this from Joan Didion - essayist, novelist, memoirist, journalist - in the rich vault of the Paris Review interviews: 

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. . . . Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

And this:

Interviewer: You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why. 

Joan Didion: It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

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