Joan Didion Quotes

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Joan Didion

Profession : Author

Birth : December 5, 1934

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

Joan Didion

A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions - leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways - those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California.

Joan Didion

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion

The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.

Joan Didion

I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.

Joan Didion

Call me the author.

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

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.

Joan Didion

Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.

Joan Didion

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

Joan Didion

I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

Joan Didion

In Brentwood we had a big safe-deposit box to put manuscripts in if we left town during fire season. It was such a big box that we never bothered to clean it out.

Joan Didion

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

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

I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

Joan Didion

Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.

Joan Didion

Nothing is critic-proof.

Joan Didion

I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.

Joan Didion

I lead a very conventional life.

Joan Didion

I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.

Joan Didion