Top 100 Didion Quotes
#1. Sometimes things reveal themselves to you a little bit. I think it was Joan Didion that said, "We write to find out what we're thinking." And sometimes that happens.
Craig Finn
#2. (As Joan Didion said, "I don't know what I think until I write about it.")
Elizabeth Gilbert
#3. To really love Joan Didion - to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase - you have to be female.
Caitlin Flanagan
#4. I love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L.A.
Rachel Kushner
#5. The Eagles's 1977 hit "Hotel California" was a flawless piece of craftsmanship, but it was about upscale fatalism and gilded cages, about the hotel you can check into but never leave. It sounded as though Joan Didion had started writing lyrics. As
Rebecca Solnit
#6. I love Joan Didion, but I love her writing. I don't think meeting her could solve my problems or make me understand the world better.
John Darnielle
#7. There is something so hopeful about a diary, a journal, a new notebook, which Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf both wrote about. A blog. Perhaps we all are waiting for someone to discover us.
Lily Koppel
#8. I'm listening to Gogol Bordello, which is totally random, but I love him. Just finished the new Joan Didion book, Blue Nights, which I loved. I haven't been to the movies in God knows how long. I haven't been doing anything but living in a bubble, making jewelry!
Pamela Love
#9. I have always identified with Joan Didion's depiction of Los Angeles and Southern California, ever since reading 'Play It As It Lays,' 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' and 'The White Album.'
Henry Rollins
#10. To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do.
Maya Angelou
#11. I've been watching a lot of Joan Didion interviews on YouTube. I love her. My drummer has gotten me into looking at Terence McKenna interviews.
St. Vincent
#12. Male novelists were granted a 'social tradition' in which to operate, Didion discovered" 'hard drinkers, bad livers, wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts.
Tracy Daugherty
#13. I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.
Caitlin Flanagan
#14. A young female essayist saying they're influenced by Joan Didion is like a young female singer-songwriter saying they're influenced by Joni Mitchell.
Meghan Daum
#15. Talking with friends about books harks back to the original impulse behind storytelling, the forging of human bonds. We have told ourselves stories not just, in Joan Didion's phrase, in order to live, but in order to live with one another.
Brian Hall
#16. ("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?")
Joan Didion
#17. 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.
Joan Didion
#18. The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
Joan Didion
#19. 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
#20. I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
Joan Didion
#21. 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
#23. Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere
Joan Didion
#24. I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.
Joan Didion
#25. I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
Joan Didion
#26. We all survive more than we think we can.
Joan Didion
#27. Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
Joan Didion
#28. You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.
Joan Didion
#29. Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.
Joan Didion
#30. Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
Joan Didion
#31. it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built "The Breakers" he damned himself.
Joan Didion
#32. I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
Joan Didion
#33. Some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.
Joan Didion
#34. Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
Joan Didion
#35. We all remember what we need to remember.
Joan Didion
#36. I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
Joan Didion
#37. To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves
there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
Joan Didion
#38. 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
#39. I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.
Joan Didion
#40. It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.
Joan Didion
#41. Nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.
Joan Didion
#42. Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion
#43. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be
Joan Didion
#44. 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
#45. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.
Joan Didion
#46. Bringing him back" had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. "Seeing it clearly" did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need. I
Joan Didion
#47. New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.
Joan Didion
#48. Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
Joan Didion
#49. I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.
Joan Didion
#50. 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.
Joan Didion
#51. one more piece of evidence that assigned reading makes nothing happen.
Joan Didion
#52. 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
#53. So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.
Joan Didion
#54. 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.
Joan Didion
#55. 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
#56. They mentioned everything but one thing: that she had left the point in a bedroom in Encino.
Joan Didion
#57. I used to tell John my dreams, not to understand them but to get rid of them, clear my mind for the day.
Joan Didion
#58. When you lose someone, a whole lot of perfectly normal circumstances suddenly take on different meaning. You see it in a different light. You wonder if they knew. I wondered. Doctors have told me that people do have a sense of their own approaching death.
Joan Didion
#59. I can remember, when I was in college, irritating deeply somebody I was going out with, because he would ask me what I was thinking and I would say I was thinking nothing. And it was true.
Joan Didion
#60. 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.
Joan Didion
#61. We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
Joan Didion
#62. I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
Joan Didion
#63. You couldn't pay for her hats,' her father, a ship's captain, had told her suitors by way of discouragement, and perhaps they had all been discouraged but my grandfather, an innocent from the Georgetown Divide who read books.
Joan Didion
#64. After a while there were no more tule fogs at dawn and all Charlotte wanted was one night that did not end badly.
Joan Didion
#65. 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
#66. Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
Joan Didion
#67. In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside.
Joan Didion
#68. 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
#69. In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.
Joan Didion
#70. I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
Joan Didion
#72. 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.
Joan Didion
#73. Once she was born, I was never not afraid.
Joan Didion
#74. 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.
Joan Didion
#75. Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.
Information is control.
Joan Didion
#76. It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?
Joan Didion
#77. 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.
Joan Didion
#78. I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
Joan Didion
#80. He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
Joan Didion
#81. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
Joan Didion
#82. The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.
Joan Didion
#83. It also occurred to me that this was a promise I could not keep. I could not always take care of her. I could not never leave her. She was no longer a child. She was an adult. Things happened in life that mothers could not prevent or fix.
Joan Didion
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.
Joan Didion
#87. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.
Joan Didion
#88. Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.
Joan Didion
#89. I offer you a second way of approaching the moment where everything in your life just stops, this one from the actor Robert Duvall: "I exist very nicely between the words 'action' and 'cut.'"
And even a third way: "It doesn't present as pain," I once heard an oncological surgeon say of cancer.
Joan Didion
#90. You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.
Joan Didion
#91. Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley.
Joan Didion
#92. 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
#93. In both England and the United States, he observed, the contemporary trend was to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.
Joan Didion
#94. Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
Joan Didion
#95. 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
#96. I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
Joan Didion
#97. 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
#98. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.
Joan Didion
#99. I am not much engaged by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes me a letter. It is no longer necessary for them even to write me. I know when someone is thinking of me. I learn to deal with this.
Joan Didion
#100. The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.
Joan Didion
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
