Quotes By 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.

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.

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.

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

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.

I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance.

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.

Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels 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.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

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.

I lead a very conventional life.

Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

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.

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.

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

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.

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

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

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

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

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.

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.

It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade.

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

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.

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

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

Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't.

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

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.