Quotes By Joan Didion

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

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.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

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.

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 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.

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

Style is character.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.