Quotes by Joan Didion

About Joan Didion:

Joan Didion is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, st...

Joan Didion

Mourning has its place but also its limits.

Joan Didion

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

Joan Didion

I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.

Joan Didion

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Joan Didion

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion

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 ma...

Joan Didion

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

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

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

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

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

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

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

Joan Didion

Author Bio

  • NameJoan Didion
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornDecember 5, 1934
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionScreenwriter; Author; Novelist; Journalist
  • WorksSlouching Towards Bethlehem; Play It As It Lays; The Year Of Magical Thinking
  • AwardsNational Humanities Medal; National Book Award; George Polk Award