Joan Didion Quotes

206 quotes in 2555 categories

• The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you…
• Despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, [the death of a parent] dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and may…
• In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.
• To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the…
• Writing is the act of saying "I," of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying "listen to me, see it my way, change your mind."
• My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and…
• People tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember. Writers…
• It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want,…
• Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic,…
• Throw yourself into the convulsions of the world. I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't believe progress is necessarily part…
• New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining…
• To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
• A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool…
• Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind…
• Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
• If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with…
• We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do…
• We all survive more than we think we can,
• When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I…
• Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.

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