Joan Didion quotes

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs. (Joan Didion)
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. View quote
Joan Didion
Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price. View quote
Joan Didion
Writers are always selling somebody out. View quote
Joan Didion
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? View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
Joan Didion
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect. View quote
Joan Didion
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
Joan Didion
You have to pick the places you don't walk away from. View quote
Joan Didion
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. (Joan Didion)
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. View quote
Joan Didion
What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone. View quote
Joan Didion
The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language. View quote
Joan Didion
As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs... The way I write is who I am, or have become... View quote
Joan Didion
I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose. View quote
Joan Didion
Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control. View quote
Joan Didion
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember. View quote
Joan Didion
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 sanity is. View quote
Joan Didion
Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control. View quote
Joan Didion
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. (Joan Didion)
What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask. View quote
Joan Didion
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing. View quote
Joan Didion
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive. View quote
Joan Didion
Time is the school in which we learn. View quote
Joan Didion