Joan Didion Quotes

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Joan Didion

Profession : Author

Birth : December 5, 1934

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

Style is character.

Joan Didion

It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.

Joan Didion

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

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

To make an omelette, you need not only those broken eggs but someone 'oppressed' to beat them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make 51 percent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class.

Joan Didion

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

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.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

We imagine things - that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. We have no choice, so we do it.

Joan Didion

Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.

Joan Didion

I couldn't give away my husband's shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes - I don't know what it was about the shoes, but a lot of people have mentioned to me that shoes took on more meaning than we generally think they do... their attachment to the ground, I don't know - but that did have a real resonance for me.

Joan Didion

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion