Joan Didion quotes

Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist known for her clear-eyed prose and chronicling of American culture. Her works often explored themes of loss, identity, and social upheaval. She became an influential voice in New Journalism and modern American literature. Here are 101 of her quotes:

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs. (Joan Didion)

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 I fear.

Joan Didion

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

Joan Didion

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Joan Didion

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

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

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

Joan Didion

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Joan Didion

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

You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.

Joan Didion

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. (Joan Didion)

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

Joan Didion

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

Joan Didion

The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

Joan Didion

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 in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs... The way I write is who I am, or have become...

Joan Didion

I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

Joan Didion

Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.

Joan Didion

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

Joan Didion

Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.

Joan Didion

Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

Joan Didion

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. (Joan Didion)

What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.

Joan Didion

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

Joan Didion

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

Joan Didion

Time is the school in which we learn.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion

Joan Didion - Image

Photo: Wikimedia commons, GFDL

Occupation: American Author
Born: December 5, 1934
Died: December 23, 2021
Quotes count: 101
Wikipedia: Joan Didion

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