Joan Didion Quotes

He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.

Mourning has its place but also its limits.

We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.

I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can't read it in one sitting, you're going to lose the rhythm of it. You're going to lose the shape of it.

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

I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

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.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.

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

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."

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.

The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.

One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense.

I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything every day, but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

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

I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.

Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.

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

You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.

I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.

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

The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.

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

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

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

Information is control.

I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.

I have not been the witness I wanted to be.

I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

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

I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color.

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

Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.

Aging and its evidence remain lifes most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.

I lead a very conventional life.

I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.

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.

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

Outside, a ceiling of pearly gray clouds coalesced over Manhattan, and the apartment had grown dark. It just keeps dripping. It's been like this all week, .. Rain would be a relief.

You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right.

For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

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

I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.