Joan Didion Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

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

Joan Didion
I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.

Joan Didion
I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.

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
It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.

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

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

Joan Didion
Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

Joan Didion
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.

Joan Didion
Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.

Joan Didion
In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.

Joan Didion
I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.

Joan Didion
A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.

Joan Didion
We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.

Joan Didion
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.

Joan Didion
It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.

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

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

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

Joan Didion
And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I.

Joan Didion
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

Joan Didion
To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Joan Didion
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Joan Didion
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.

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

Joan Didion
Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels 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
It is often said that New York is a city of only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.

Joan Didion
Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago; Vermont and Chicago are relative constants, against which one measures one's own change. All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.

Joan Didion
In Houston the air was warm and rich and suggestive of fossil fuel.

Joan Didion
You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives,... but there's no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.

Joan Didion