Top 311 Quotes & Sayings by Joan Didion

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Joan Didion.

Last updated on December 3, 2024.

Joan Didion was an American writer. Her career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s and the Hollywood lifestyle. Her political writing often concentrated on the subtext of political and social rhetoric. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking. She later adapted the book into a play, which premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.

American - Author | Born: December 5, 1934

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

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

Writers are always selling somebody out.

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

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 demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

Joan Didion

Call me the author.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

I can remember, when I was in college, irritating deeply somebody I was going out with, because he would ask me what I was thinking and I would say I was thinking nothing. And it was true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

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

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

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

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

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 couldn't give away my husband's shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes - I don't know what it was about the shoes, but a lot of people have mentioned to me that shoes took on more meaning than we generally think they do... their attachment to the ground, I don't know - but that did have a real resonance for me.

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

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

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

My mother 'gave teas' the way other mothers breathed. Her own mother 'gave teas.' All of their friends 'gave teas,' each involving butter cookies extruded from a metal press and pastel bonbons ordered from See's.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

Joan Didion

You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.

Joan Didion

We all survive more than we think we can.

Joan Didion

When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends.

Joan Didion

A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

Joan Didion

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

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

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.

Joan Didion

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 strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

Joan Didion

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

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

Style is character.

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

The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Joan Didion

The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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.

Joan Didion

Top 311 Quotes & Sayings by Joan Didion

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