Joan Didion Quotes

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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.

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.

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

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?

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

You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.

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

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

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

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.

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

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't.

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.

Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.

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.

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 don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.

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

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

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

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.

Call me the author.

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

Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

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