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.
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.
Joan Didion

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.
Joan Didion

Call me the author.
Joan Didion

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

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

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

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
Joan Didion

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

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

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

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

Writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion

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