The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. — 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
Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought? — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion… — 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… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning… — 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
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
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally,… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
It occurs to me as I write that this "white light," usually presented dippily (evidence of afterlife, higher power), is in fact… — 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
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
“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as… — 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
“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
“I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to… — 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… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer.… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at. What I see and what I fear. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally,… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
People tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing… — 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
The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that… — 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
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
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
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
