Joan Didion Quotes

The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

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

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

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.

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

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

Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

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

That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

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

Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.

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

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.

My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

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

We all survive more than we think we can.

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

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

[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

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.

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

Anything worth having has its price.

The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.

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

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.

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

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.

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?

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

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

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

Time is the school in which we learn.

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

When the ground starts moving, all bets are off.

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

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

In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.