I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors.… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel,… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“This “I” was the voice of no author in my house. This “I” was someone who not only knew why Charlotte went… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
It's just a deep pleasure to read something you've written yourself - if and when you like it. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.” — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I just read everything I could get my hands on. I taught myself to read or my mother taught me. Who knows… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character "X." I don't have a very clear… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
When I am near the end of a book, I have to sleep in the same room with it. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“You couldn't pay for her hats,' her father, a ship's captain, had told her suitors by way of discouragement, and perhaps they… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
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… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
My mother 'gave teas' the way other mothers breathed. Her own mother 'gave teas.' All of their friends 'gave teas,' each involving butter cookies… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“Research to date has shown that, like many other stressors, grief frequently leads to changes in the endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous, and cardiovascular systems;… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
