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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 power

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

— Joan Didion people

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

— Joan Didion life

Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.

— Joan Didion sky

You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.

— Joan Didion you

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

— Joan Didion you

I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.

— Joan Didion want

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

— Joan Didion pain

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

— Joan Didion change

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

— Joan Didion power

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

— Joan Didion respect

I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this plane and went to San Francisco, and the minute that plane lifted above the clouds, I felt this incredible sense of lightness.

— Joan Didion light

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

— Joan Didion life

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

— Joan Didion thought

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

— Joan Didion writing

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 fear

Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

— Joan Didion pain

One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense.

— Joan Didion people

I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.

— Joan Didion people

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

— Joan Didion mind

You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

— Joan Didion change

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.

— Joan Didion art

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 love

Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

— Joan Didion art

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 grief

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

— Joan Didion end

Do not whine; Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

— Joan Didion time

Writers are always selling somebody out.

— Joan Didion body

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.

— Joan Didion writing

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