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
The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember. — 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
The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really,… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I can remember, when I was in college, irritating deeply somebody I was going out with, because he would ask me what… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. — 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
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm… — 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
