Top 311 Quotes & Sayings by Joan Didion - Page 2

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.

I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this plane and went to San Francisco, and the minute that plane lifted above the clouds, I felt this incredible sense of lightness.

I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.

When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal.

To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.

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.

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.

Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.

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.

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.

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.

The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black.

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

I never think people are too careful with me.

To make an omelette, you need not only those broken eggs but someone 'oppressed' to beat them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make 51 percent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class.

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.

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

I lead a very conventional life.

I was raised an Episcopalian. And I did not and I don't believe that anyone is looking out for me personally.

Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.

All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.

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

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

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 got the prize. The prize was California.

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.

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.

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.

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.

I am always writing to myself.

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.

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.

In many ways, writing is the act of saying 'I,' of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, 'Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.' It's an aggressive, even a hostile act.

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

You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

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

I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.

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.

Nothing is critic-proof.

When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.

He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.

Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be

There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.

We are the stories we tell ourselves

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

We write to discover what we think.

What I want to tell you today is not to move into that world where you're alone with yourself and your mantra and your fitness program or whatever it is that you might use to try to control the world by closing it out. I want to tell you just to live in the mess. Throw yourself out into the convulsions of the world. I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm telling you to live in it. Try and get it. Take chances, make your own work, take pride in it. Seize the moment.

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.