Joan Didion Quotes

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was...

There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that...

The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tri...

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betr...

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequ...

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at ...

Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and t...

Privilege" is something else."Privilege" is a judgment."Privilege" is an opinion."Privilege" is an a...

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind o...

I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, ...

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, an...

it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some...

More than anyone else in the society, these men had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. A...

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not sh...

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bi...

It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to cal...

As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside ra...

Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again w...

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not th...

I put the word "diagnosis" in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a "diagnosis" le...

Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

...the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present t...

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not sh...

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. W...

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tri...

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be where no storms come.

I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just ...

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something ...

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revol...

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find ...

It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentr...

I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not ...

Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only questio...

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the nar...

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line u...

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have ev...

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it...We might expect that we will be pr...

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

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, th...

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, an...

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. W...

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

[P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, sin...

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I...

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking what I'm looking at what I see and what it means w...

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others — who are, after ...

She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped ...

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have ev...

I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.They remember the tree that died, the gull t...

My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would sti...

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.

We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's ...

The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we offic...

Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time...

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

It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism ...

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something not th...

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...S...

I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my w...

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is a dissatisfaction with self.

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them att...

The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.

Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies t...

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions ...

I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take t...

This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire e...

I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.

He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do t...

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tel...

we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very ...

The death of a parent, he wrote, 'despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things...

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all...

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

...nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite ...

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have...

I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, bro...

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I h...

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, ...

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense th...

What these men represented was not 'The West' but what was for this century a relatively new kind of...

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

I know what the fear is.The fear is not for what is lost.What is lost is already in the wall.What is...

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wron...

We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessing...

their suburbia house in Brentwood" was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-yea...

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.I am seventy-five years old: this ...

Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested -...

Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.

Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer...

I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the ma...