Joan Didion Quotes

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Joan Didion

Profession : Author

Birth : December 5, 1934

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Joan Didion

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

Joan Didion

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.

Joan Didion

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

Joan Didion

You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.

Joan Didion

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

I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.

Joan Didion

I was raised an Episcopalian. And I did not and I don't believe that anyone is looking out for me personally.

Joan Didion

I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.

Joan Didion

I am always writing to myself.

Joan Didion

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

Joan Didion

Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.

Joan Didion

I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.

Joan Didion

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

There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.

Joan Didion

All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.

Joan Didion

I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.

Joan Didion

I can remember, when I was in college, irritating deeply somebody I was going out with, because he would ask me what I was thinking and I would say I was thinking nothing. And it was true.

Joan Didion

When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal.

Joan Didion

You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

Joan Didion