Joan Didion quotes - page 3

We all survive more than we think we can. (Joan Didion)
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. View quote
Joan Didion
When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal. View quote
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. View quote
Joan Didion
I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response. View quote
Joan Didion
I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted. View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
Joan Didion
The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities. View quote
Joan Didion
There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could. View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
Joan Didion
Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service. (Joan Didion)
I lead a very conventional life. View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
Joan Didion
I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die. View quote
Joan Didion
I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe. View quote
Joan Didion
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage. View quote
Joan Didion
I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one. View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
Joan Didion
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff. View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
Joan Didion
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought? (Joan Didion)
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 turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. View quote
Joan Didion
Memories are what you no longer want to remember. View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
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. View quote
Joan Didion