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Joan Didion Quotes

Joan Didion is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.

✵ 5. December 1934  •  Other names Ջոան Դիդիոն, 琼·迪迪恩, 瓊·迪迪恩
Joan Didion photo

Works

Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Blue Nights
Joan Didion
Joan Didion: 48 quotes7 likes

Famous Joan Didion Quotes

“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

“It is often said that New York is a city for 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 book Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Source: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“I don't know what I think until I write it down.”

Joan Didion

“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.”

Joan Didion book Blue Nights

Source: Blue Nights

“I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”

Joan Didion book Play It as It Lays

Source: Play It as It Lays

Joan Didion Quotes about life

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

Joan Didion

Source: "On Self-Respect", in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“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.”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

“Grief is different. 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.”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

“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

From the novel Run, River

Joan Didion Quotes about time

“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

“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

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

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

“Time is the school in which we learn”

Joan Didion

Joan Didion Quotes

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”

Joan Didion

Source: Essays & Conversations

“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

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Joan Didion book The White Album

Source: "The White Album", in The White Album

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

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 book The White Album

The White Album
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/books/didion-calif.html

“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”

Joan Didion

Source: On Self-Respect

“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.”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

“I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”

Joan Didion Where I Was From

Source: Where I Was From

“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.

Information is control.”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

“[O]ne 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.”

Joan Didion book Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Source: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.”

Joan Didion book Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Source: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

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

Joan Didion

"On Self-Respect", in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“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.”

Joan Didion book Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Source: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”

Joan Didion book Play It as It Lays

Source: Play It as It Lays

“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

“Writers are always selling somebody out.”

Joan Didion

"A Preface", in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

“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.”

Joan Didion book Play It as It Lays

Source: Play It as It Lays

“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.”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

“I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted.”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs… The way I write is who I am, or have become…”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.”

Joan Didion

“The past could be jettisoned… but seeds got carried.”

Joan Didion Where I Was From

Source: Where I Was From

“One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me.”

Joan Didion

"On the Mall", in The White Album

“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.”

Joan Didion book Slouching Towards Bethlehem

&quot;The Howard Hughes Underground,&quot; http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/detail?vid=7&amp;sid=e10e8a49-3c75-4cb4-8d00-c35bb5bdf29a@sessionmgr4001 The Saturday Evening Post (23 August 1967) <br class="br"> &quot;7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38,&quot; http://books.google.com/books?id=_pgrUFe9Fh8C&amp;q=%22Americans+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%22&amp;pg=PA71#v=onepage Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

“When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges.”

Joan Didion

"Why I Write" (1975)

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned.”

Joan Didion

"Why I Write" (1975)

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