Quotes By Joan Didion

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.

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

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.

You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.

My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.

Style is character.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.

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

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

I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.

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 couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

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

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.

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

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

I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

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 don't make sense.

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?

Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.

The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.

I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.

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