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106 quotes by Joan Didion

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

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I think 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... →

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

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

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

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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... →

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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.

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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... →

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Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and... →

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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically... →

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Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

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

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

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