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

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 strok...

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and dem...

Joan Didion

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

Joan Didion

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.

Joan Didion

Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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.

Joan Didion

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.

Joan Didion

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.

Joan Didion

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.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

We all survive more than we think we can.

Joan Didion

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.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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.

Joan Didion

A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions - leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways - those people were not the people who go...

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