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Joan Didion
13 quotes
“The wind shows us how close to the edge we are”
Joan Didion (1934–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writers are always selling somebody out.”
Joan Didion (1934–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.”
Joan Didion (1934–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.”
Joan Didion (1934–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?”
Joan Didion (1934–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me.”
Joan Didion (1934–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Joan Didion (1934–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”
Joan Didion (1934–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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, so versed in the uses of power.”
Joan Didion (1934–2021) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Howard Hughes Underground," The Saturday Evening Post (23 August 1967)
“Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned.”
Joan Didion (1934–2021) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why I Write" (1975)
“When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges.”
Joan Didion (1934–2021) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why I Write" (1975)
“Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout.”
Joan Didion (1934–2021) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook", The Marginalian (19 November 2012)
“In many ways, 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. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”
Joan Didion (1934–2021) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why I Write" (1975)