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.
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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...

Joan Didion

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.

Joan Didion

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

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

Joan Didion

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

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

I lead a very conventional life.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.

Joan Didion

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

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

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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.

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