Joan Didion Quotes

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

Joan Didion

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

  

  Joan Didion
  • People
  • Christmas
  • California

• Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.

  

  Joan Didion
  • Interesting
  • Grief

• I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.

  

  Joan Didion
  • World
  • Book
  • Hate

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

  

  Joan Didion
  • People

• 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
  • People
  • Writing
  • Mind

• 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
  • Broken

• You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.

  

  Joan Didion
  • Decision

• 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

• Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

  

  Joan Didion
  • Remember
  • Memories

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

  

  Joan Didion
  • Great
  • Power
  • Free

• 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
  • Time

• I never think people are too careful with me.

  

  Joan Didion
  • People

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

  

  Joan Didion
  • Pool
  • Swimming

• I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.

  

  Joan Didion
  • World
  • Control

• 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
  • Book
  • Amazing
  • Flying

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

  

  Joan Didion

• Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.

  

  Joan Didion
  • Mind
  • Dance

• 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
  • Money
  • Power
  • Dream

• Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.

  

  Joan Didion
  • People
  • Time
  • Good

• I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.

  

  Joan Didion

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

  

  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
  • Writing

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

  

  Joan Didion
  • Great
  • Service

• 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
  • People
  • Real
  • Husband