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

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.
Joan Didion

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.
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

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.
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.
Joan Didion

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.
Joan Didion

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

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
Joan Didion

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.
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