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 used to tell John my dreams, not to understand them but to get rid of them, clear my mind for the day.

Joan Didion

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed. They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car. They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that...

Joan Didion

We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections. . . . Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes i...

Joan Didion

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

Joan Didion

My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry. I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch. I would still remember to renew my passport. Grief is d...

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. And it always does.

Joan Didion

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the...

Joan Didion

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion

Everything's going along as usual and then all shit breaks loose.

Joan Didion

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel

Joan Didion

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 readi...

Joan Didion

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

Joan Didion

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.

Joan Didion

The truth is, it's easier for me to write than talk... to express the state I'm in at any time.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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.

Joan Didion

Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.

Joan Didion

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.

Joan Didion

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.

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