Joan Didion Quotes - BrainyQuote

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. Joan Didion

Changes, Fast, Ends

I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one. Joan Didion

Swimming, Always, Never

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

Self-Respect, Which, Springs

Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff. Joan Didion

Sky, Afternoon, Coast

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

Respect, Self-Respect, Give

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. Joan Didion

Door, Bad, I Think

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

Grammar, Play, Piano

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

Difficult, About, Which

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

Price, Self-Respect, Having

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. Joan Didion

Life, Changes, Ordinary

Top 10
Joan Didion
Quotes

You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever. Joan Didion

Making, Ever, Sure

A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions - leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways - those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California. Joan Didion

Behind, Brought, Wastes

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

Want, Means, I Write

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. Joan Didion

Bed, Fact, Half

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. Joan Didion

Broken, Reminders, Longer

Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that. Joan Didion

Big, Other, Been

It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento. Joan Didion

Anybody, About, Spent

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

Original, Still, Strokes

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

Always, Mirrors, Been

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way. Joan Didion

Temporary, Here, Ease

The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control. Joan Didion

Control, Average, Below

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

Away, Places, Pick

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. Joan Didion

Change, Go, Tell

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. 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

Down, Matter, Watercolors

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. Joan Didion

Want, Deceiving, Madmen

Memories are what you no longer want to remember. Joan Didion

Remember, Want, Longer

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