Joan Didion

“I’m only myself in front of my typewriter.”

— Joan Didion

If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

“You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change.”

— Joan Didion

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

“I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the…

— Joan Didion

“ That no one dies of migraine seems to someone deep in an attack as an ambiguous blessing. ”

— Joan Didion

“Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is “nothing.”

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

“To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a…

— Joan Didion

The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it,…

— Joan Didion

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning…

— Joan Didion

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a…

— Joan Didion

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow…

— Joan Didion

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves…

— Joan Didion

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…

— Joan Didion

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions…

— Joan Didion

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to…

— Joan Didion

“It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the…

— Joan Didion

Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy…

— Joan Didion

It occurs to me as I write that this "white light," usually presented dippily (evidence of afterlife, higher power), is in fact…

— Joan Didion

“And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the…

— Joan Didion

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with…

— Joan Didion

Actually, when John died, for the first time I thought - for the first time I realized how old I was, because…

— Joan Didion

When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with…

— Joan Didion

“I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to…

— Joan Didion

I never think people are too careful with me.

— Joan Didion

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

— Joan Didion

Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.

— Joan Didion

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

— Joan Didion

“There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”

— Joan Didion

“I think I have never known anyone who led quite unexamined a life.”

— Joan Didion

When I am near the end of a book, I have to sleep in the same room with it.

— Joan Didion

You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.

— Joan Didion