Joan Didion quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Joan Didion

Joan Didion Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Joan Didion on Wise Famous Quotes.

She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card.

I had forgotten this dedication. I had not sufficiently appreciated it, a persistent theme by that stage of whatever I was going through. I

The last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up.

Can you evade the dying of the brightness?
Or do you evade only its warning?
Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.

I have not been the witness I wanted to be.

The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.

I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.

There could be no snakes in Quintana Roo's garden.
Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.

In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside.

Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.

The child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.

Hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back.

Her choices, all.
Sentimental choices, things she remembered.
I remembered them too.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

In New Orleans they have mastered the art of the motionless. In

Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

[P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.

I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.

We write to discover what we think.

I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.

Time is the school in which we learn

There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.
I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it.

There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.

To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.

Privilege" is something else.
"Privilege" is a judgment.
"Privilege" is an opinion.
"Privilege" is an accusation.

I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.

I am always writing to myself.

You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.

In fact I had no idea how to be a wife.

I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

After Princeton, the years seem like a blur, but the days seem more like rapid fire. - Donald Rumsfeld in Year of Magical Thinking

I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me.

Tell me what matters," BZ said.
Nothing," Maria said.

Anything worth having has its price.

Just an ordinary day. "And then - gone.

...the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.

I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.

Mourning has its place but also its limits.

What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?

I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.

Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.
Information is control.

All I know about grammar is its infinite power.

Some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.

We tell each other stories in order to live.

I lead a very conventional life.

There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible

I am what I am. To look for reasons is beside the point.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves
there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.

Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other's voice

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

It's just a deep pleasure to read something you've written yourself - if and when you like it.

I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.

Let me just be in the ground.
Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.

In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.

I write to know what I think.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

The past could be jettisoned ... but seeds got carried.

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

California: The west coast of Iowa.

I was cold because nothing in my body was working as it should.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

Do not whine ... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.

It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.

Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.

The way you got sideswiped was by going back. I

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.

I had never before understood what "despair" meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year.

("Tell me," a rabbi asked Daniel Bell when he said, as a child, that he did not believe in God. "Do you think God cares?")

We all remember what we need to remember.

The bereaved must be urged to "sit in a sunny room," preferably one with an open fire.

You see what the word of Michael Laski is: a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness.

We all have the same dreams.

If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.

You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.

Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age.

I don't really get things very ... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.

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."