Joan Didion's Quotes

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.

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.

I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.

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.

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.

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.

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.

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

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

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.

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.

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

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

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.

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

Writers are always selling somebody out.

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.

Call me the author.

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.

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

I lead a very conventional life.

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

I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.