Joan Didion Quotes

A collection of quotes by Joan Didion.

Joan Didion, born on December 5, 1934, is an American writer known for her distinctive prose style and incisive observations of American culture. Born and raised in Sacramento, California, Didion attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she began her writing career as an editor for the student newspaper.

Didion gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s with her penetrating essays and memoirs that explored topics ranging from politics and social issues to personal introspection. Her works, such as "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (1968) and "The White Album" (1979), encapsulate the essence of the cultural upheaval of the time and offer a unique perspective on the American experience.

Known for her clear-eyed and meticulous examination of her subjects, Didion's writing is often praised for its precise language, evocative imagery, and sharp insights. She has received numerous awards throughout her career, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005, and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992.

Joan Didion's contributions to American literature have left an indelible mark, with her works traversing the realms of fiction, nonfiction, and journalism. Her profound understanding of human nature and her ability to capture the complexities of the American psyche make her one of the most revered and influential figures in contemporary literature.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You

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.

Strength

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm loo

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.

Fear

Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece sc

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.

Movies

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of

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.

Business

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

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

Strength

Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties e

Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.

Twentieth Century

The secret point of money and power in America is neither th

The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake... but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.

Wealth

We were that generation called silent, but we were silent ne

We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.

Twentieth Century

It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing th

It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what 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. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.

Wealth

A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of afflu

A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

Water

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Authors & Writing

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitute

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

Self Respect

Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about po

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.

Property

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a h

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Science Fiction

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, rememb

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.

Travel

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people

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 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

Past

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life

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

Responsibility

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out wha

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

Dreams

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

Morals