100 Quotes by Joan Didion
Joan Didion, a literary luminary, navigates the depths of human experience with an unflinching and incisive gaze. Her prose is a masterclass in economy, where each word holds weight and meaning. Through essays and novels, Didion explores the intricacies of American culture, politics, and the human psyche, often delving into her own vulnerabilities and uncertainties. Her distinctive voice, characterized by a blend of journalistic precision and personal reflection, has redefined nonfiction writing. By dissecting the ordinary and the extraordinary, she exposes the subtle nuances that shape our perceptions and challenge our assumptions. Joan Didion's work resonates as an intellectual and emotional exploration, inviting readers to confront the complexities of existence with open eyes and an unyielding curiosity.
Joan Didion Quotes
The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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 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.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live...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. 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.
That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.
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.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.
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.
We all survive more than we think we can.
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
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.
One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.
In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.
Anything worth having has its price.
Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria.
To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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.
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be
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.
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley.
I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
Time is the school in which we learn.
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?
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.
When the ground starts moving, all bets are off.
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.
Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.
Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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.
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.
We are the stories we tell ourselves
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.
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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.
Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows. Each time this happens I am struck again by the permanent impassibility of the divide. Some people who have lost a husband or a wife report feeling that person's presence, receiving that person's advice. Some report actual sightings, what Freud described in "Mourning and Melancholia" as "a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis." Others describe not a visible apparition but just a "very strongly felt presence."
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Throw yourself 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 just telling you to live in it, to look at it, to witness it. Try and get it. Seize the moment.
People tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember. Writers are always selling somebody out.
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.
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake... but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.
I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.
In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.
Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere
The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.
We write to discover what we think.
You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.
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.
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.
Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.
In fact I no longer value this kind of memento. I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I thought I did. A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their "things," their totems.
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.
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.
Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.
That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.
Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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.
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.
Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.
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. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.
I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it.
Hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back.
When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.
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.
Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
Writers are only rarely likable.
California: The west coast of Iowa.
New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
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.
Mourning has its place but also its limits.
He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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.
I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control.
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.
There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.
I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can't read it in one sitting, you're going to lose the rhythm of it. You're going to lose the shape of it.
I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.
Information is control.
I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?
Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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."
You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.
We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.
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.
Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
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.
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.
I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything every day, but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day.
Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.
The last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up.
Memories are what you no longer want to remember.
I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.
There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
It's just a deep pleasure to read something you've written yourself - if and when you like it.
― Joan Didion Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
