Didion's Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Joan Didion

#4. 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

#5. All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.

Joan Didion

#6. Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.

Joan Didion

#7. Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.

Joan Didion

#8. Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

#12. Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago; Vermont and Chicago are relative constants, against which one measures one's own change. All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.

Joan Didion

#13. Most death now happens in hospitals. It's been medicalized. It happens away from where we deal with it directly. And that's a huge change. At the beginning of the 20th century most people died at home. Death was much more common.

Joan Didion

#14. The truth is, it's easier for me to write than talk ... to express the state I'm in at any time.

Joan Didion

#15. New York is full of people ... with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.

Joan Didion

#16. In many ways, 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.' It's an aggressive, even a hostile act.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

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

Joan Didion

#24. 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

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

#27. Becoming a parent is actually terrifying. A lot of people have that feeling about their dogs. And if you're the kind of person who's going to have that feeling about a dog you're definitely going to have that about a child.

Joan Didion

#28. Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.

Joan Didion

#29. 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

#30. Everything's going along as usual and then all shit breaks loose.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

#33. 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

#34. 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.

Joan Didion

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was "This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy." That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one's memory.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

#39. 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.

Joan Didion

#40. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

Joan Didion

#41. 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

#42. For forty years I saw myself thru John's eyes. I did not age.

Joan Didion

#43. At Beth Israel there had been Acinetobacter baumannii, which was resistant to vancomycin. "That's how you know it's a hospital infection," I recall being told by a doctor I asked at Columbia Presbyterian. "If it's resistant to vanc it's hospital. Because vanc only gets used in hospital settings.

Joan Didion

#44. I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

Joan Didion

#45. Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.

Joan Didion

#46. I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part ... I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control.

Joan Didion

#47. There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

#49. What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

Joan Didion

#50. I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.

Joan Didion

#51. 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.

Joan Didion

#52. Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.

Joan Didion

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. I have not been the witness I wanted to be.

Joan Didion

#57. We all remember what we need to remember.

Joan Didion

#58. 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

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

Joan Didion

#60. I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.

Joan Didion

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

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

Joan Didion

#65. It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

Joan Didion

#66. We all survive more than we think we can.

Joan Didion

#67. 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

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

#70. Information is control.

Joan Didion

#71. 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

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

Joan Didion

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. ("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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

Joan Didion

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. They mentioned everything but one thing: that she had left the point in a bedroom in Encino.

Joan Didion

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. one more piece of evidence that assigned reading makes nothing happen.

Joan Didion

#91. 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

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

#100. 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