The last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself.… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts… — 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
Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
If you are doing a piece about somebody, even if you admire them tremendously and express that in the piece, express that… — 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
![“If you are doing a piece about somebody, even if you admire them tremendously and express that in the piece, express that admiration, if they're not used to being written about, if they're civilians, [...] they're not used to seeing themselves through other people's eyes. So you will always see…” quote by Joan Didion](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/d61/joan-didion-497_admiration_if-you-are-doing-a-piece-about-somebody_2985641.jpg)
