Firsts Quotes by Joan Didion

11 Firsts quotes by Joan Didion

Joan Didion’s keen eye for detail shines when she writes about the first of a fresh chapter. These eleven quotes offer a measured, observant perspective on new moments.

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Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel,…

Joan Didion

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Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious…

Joan Didion

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I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a…

Joan Didion

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Everybody who undergoes a death and finds themselves grieving is obsessed with — or maybe overly focused on — the idea that…

Joan Didion

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My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that…

Joan Didion

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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is…

Joan Didion

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Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even…

Joan Didion

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I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in…

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if…

Joan Didion

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...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I…

Joan Didion

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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

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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

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Style is character.

Joan Didion

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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

Joan Didion

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“I went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues.”

Joan Didion

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“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

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I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

Joan Didion

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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

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I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.

Joan Didion

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“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

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“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

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“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

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“I just can't see the upside in this," I heard myself say by way of explanation. Later he said that if John had been…

Joan Didion

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I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are very urgent…

Joan Didion

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To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly…

Joan Didion

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