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
“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
There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be… — 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
Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will,… — 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
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
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
We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it — 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
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
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors.… — 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
Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere — 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
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
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
Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus. — 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
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
I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought… — 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
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
