Joan Didion Quotes - Page 3 of 7

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

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

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.

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

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

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

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

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

There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

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

I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.

In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.

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.

Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.

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.

On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.

I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

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 don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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."

I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

Aging and its evidence remain lifes most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.

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.

It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.

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.

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 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.

I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me.

When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color.

For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.

Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.

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.

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.

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