Top 100 Joan Didion Quotes
#1. Well, this whole question of how you work out the narrative is very mysterious. It's a good deal more arbitrary than most people who don't do it would ever believe.
Joan Didion
#2. To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
Joan Didion
#3. I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.
Joan Didion
#4. We all survive more than we think we can.
Joan Didion
#5. Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
Joan Didion
#6. Some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.
Joan Didion
#7. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
Joan Didion
#8. It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.
Joan Didion
#9. Death of a parent, he wrote, despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago.
Joan Didion
#10. Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone. After
Joan Didion
#11. 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?
Joan Didion
#12. 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.
Joan Didion
#13. Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
Joan Didion
#14. In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside.
Joan Didion
#15. There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
Joan Didion
#16. In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.
Joan Didion
#17. Everybody who undergoes a death and finds themselves grieving is obsessed with the idea that they can't display self-pity, they have to be strong. Actually there are a lot of reasons why you are going to feel sorry for yourself, but that's your first concern.
Joan Didion
#18. One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.
Joan Didion
#19. You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.
Joan Didion
#20. At a point during the summer it occurred to me that I had no letters from John, not one. We had only rarely been far or long apart.
Joan Didion
#21. There could be no snakes in Quintana Roo's garden.
Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.
Joan Didion
#22. Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
Joan Didion
#23. The past could be jettisoned ... but seeds got carried.
Joan Didion
#24. A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.
Joan Didion
#25. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.
Joan Didion
#26. MARIA MADE A LIST of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar's alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.
Joan Didion
#27. Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach ... I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.
Joan Didion
#28. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Joan Didion
#29. By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.
Joan Didion
#30. The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.
Joan Didion
#31. And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I.
Joan Didion
#32. 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?
Joan Didion
#33. 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?
Joan Didion
#34. I did not believe in the resurrection of the body but I still believed that given the right circumstances he would come back. He who left the faint traces before he died, the Number Three pencil. O
Joan Didion
#35. You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
Joan Didion
#36. Let me just be in the ground.
Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.
Joan Didion
#37. After Princeton, the years seem like a blur, but the days seem more like rapid fire. - Donald Rumsfeld in Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
#38. I was four or five, and my mother gave me a big black tablet, because I kept complaining that I was bored. She said, "Then write something. Then you can read it." In fact, I had just learned to read, so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something - and then read it!
Joan Didion
#39. I went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues.
Joan Didion
#40. pupils were fixed in the position of wide black dilatation that signifies brain death, and obviously would never respond to light again.
Joan Didion
#41. The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution ... In theory, these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.
Joan Didion
#42. What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
Joan Didion
#43. It's just a deep pleasure to read something you've written yourself - if and when you like it.
Joan Didion
#44. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
Joan Didion
#45. I promised myself that I would maintain momentum.
"Maintain momentum" was the imperative that echoed all the way downtown.
In fact I had no idea what would happen if I lost it.
In fact I had no idea what it was.
Joan Didion
#46. If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
Joan Didion
#47. I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.
Joan Didion
#48. Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.
Joan Didion
#49. Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.
Joan Didion
#50. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.
Joan Didion
#51. 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.
Joan Didion
#52. There was silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.
Joan Didion
#54. She hoped that although he could not hear her she could somehow imprint her ordinary love upon his memory through all eternity, hoped he would rise thinking of her, we were each other, we were each other, not that it mattered much in the long run but what else mattered as much.
Joan Didion
#55. Why make this call and not just say what you wanted?
His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes.
Joan Didion
#56. I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
Joan Didion
#57. I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind the locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
#59. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them
Joan Didion
#60. Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on 'Midnight Confessions and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.
Joan Didion
#61. I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.
Joan Didion
#62. She was the right girl at the right time. She had only a small repertory of Child ballads, never trained her pure soprano and annoyed some purists because she was indifferent to the origins of her material and sang everything 'sad'.
Joan Didion
#63. I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it.
Joan Didion
#64. I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write.
Joan Didion
#65. How could this have happened when everything was normal?
Joan Didion
#66. It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Joan Didion
#67. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card.
Joan Didion
#68. A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
Joan Didion
#69. Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
Joan Didion
#70. There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
Joan Didion
#71. My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.
Joan Didion
#72. I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man's soul.
Joan Didion
#73. The child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.
Joan Didion
#74. [P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.
Joan Didion
#75. Why, if those were my images of death, did I remain so unable to accept the fact that he had died? Was it because I was failing to understand it as something that had happened to him? Was it because I was still understanding it as something that had happened to me? Life
Joan Didion
#76. I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos.
Joan Didion
#77. The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.
Joan Didion
#78. 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.
Joan Didion
#79. Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went "but where is the school-girl who used to be me," and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that.
Joan Didion
#80. My mother 'gave teas' the way other mothers breathed. Her own mother 'gave teas.' All of their friends 'gave teas,' each involving butter cookies extruded from a metal press and pastel bonbons ordered from See's.
Joan Didion
#81. I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
Joan Didion
#82. A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
Joan Didion
#83. When I am near the end of a book, I have to sleep in the same room with it.
Joan Didion
#84. I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.
Joan Didion
#85. I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.
Joan Didion
#86. Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
Joan Didion
#87. I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.
Joan Didion
#88. 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.
Joan Didion
#89. Some people around San Bernardino say that Arthwell Hayton suffered; others say that he did not suffer at all. Perhaps he did not, for time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present, or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew.
Joan Didion
#90. On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
Joan Didion
#91. 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.
Joan Didion
#92. Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.
Joan Didion
#93. This sense that the world can be reinvented [evokes] the Sixties in this country, those years when no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring ...
Joan Didion
#94. In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.
Joan Didion
#95. 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
Joan Didion
#96. It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.
Joan Didion
#97. 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.
Joan Didion
#98. When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something ... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
Joan Didion
#99. Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.
Joan Didion
#100. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs ... The way I write is who I am, or have become ...
Joan Didion
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