Joan Didion Quotes

We are the stories we tell ourselves

I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

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.

any compulsion tries to justify itself.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

We write to discover what we think.

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

I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.

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 are always selling somebody out.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.

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 have. It gets me into a rhythm.

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

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.

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

Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.

Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.

I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.

Hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back.

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.

To believe in'the greater good' isto operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.

I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.

I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

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

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.

If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.

There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.

Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.

California: The west coast of Iowa.

I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.

New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.

Writers are only rarely likable.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

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

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.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.

There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.