It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set… — 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 minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page… — 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
