Quotes By Joan Didion

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

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

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.

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.

I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.