Joan Didion
49 quotes
Biography
"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."
"To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves � there lies the great, singular power of self-respect."
"The wind shows us how close to the edge we are"
"Writers are always selling somebody out."
"Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price."
"The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs."
"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?"
"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."
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned."
"When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges."
"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 the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up."
"Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?"
"Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that."
"Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power."
"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."
"I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel."
"Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it."
"The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love."
"[P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things."
"I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."
"I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water."