« All Writing Quotes · Joan Didion's Page
Writing Quotes by Joan Didion
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.
- Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
- It occurs to me as I write that this "white light," usually presented dippily (evidence of afterlife, higher power), is in fact precisely consistent with…
- I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.
- The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it
- Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.
- Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed…
- Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
- I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what…
- Writers are always selling somebody out.
- Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all…
- We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
- Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is…
- I don't know what I think until I write it down.
- The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in…
- We write to discover what we think.
- When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the…
- As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident…
- Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment…
- I am always writing to myself.
More Ways to Read Writing Quotes by Joan Didion
More Writing Quotes
- Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. — Hannah Arendt
- Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing. — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then… — Paul Auster
- When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush… — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
- A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. — Richard Bach
- In every song I write, whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing… — Billie Joe Armstrong
- I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know. — Andrea Arnold
- Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. — Sholem Asch
- Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core… — Isaac Asimov
- If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. — Isaac Asimov
- Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. — Isaac Asimov