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
“I began to make notes. I began to write down everything I saw and heard and remembered and imagined. I began to… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion 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
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
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
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
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
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 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 don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other's voice” — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing. — 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
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
In many ways, writing is the act of saying 'I,' of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, 'Listen to me, see… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth… — 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 it means. What I… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Writing is the act of saying "I," of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying "listen to me, see it my way,… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Discovery still happens in the writing. You start in nonfiction with a whole lot more going for you, because all the discovery… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I was four or five, and my mother gave me a big black tablet, because I kept complaining that I was bored.… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea… — 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
“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
Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is… — 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
![“My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.” quote by Joan Didion](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/008/joan-didion-497_age_my-first-notebook-was-a-big-five-tablet_2074889.jpg)
