Top 60 Joan Didion Quotes

I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance.

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.

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

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

When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.

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

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.

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.

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

The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black.

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

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance 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.

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.

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.

A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

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.

You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

In Brentwood we had a big safe-deposit box to put manuscripts in if we left town during fire season. It was such a big box that we never bothered to clean it out.

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

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.

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

I never think people are too careful with me.

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.

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

There’s a general impulse to distract the grieving person – as if you could.

I’ve never been keen on open adoption. It doesn’t seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.

I was raised an Episcopalian. And I did not and I don’t believe that anyone is looking out for me personally.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.

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.

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.

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.

Call me the author.

I lead a very conventional life.

It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set – which was kind of shallow in my case anyway – had begun to fade.

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

It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.

I am always writing to myself.

It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.

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.

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.

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.

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’m totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.

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.

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.

To believe in ‘the greater good’ is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.

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

When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends.

I’m not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself – there is a basic indifference toward people.

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

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

Style is character.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

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