Quotes by

Joan Didion

Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled. – 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

A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye. – Joan Didion

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self, an impossible claim that one should be at once Rose Bowl princess, medieval scholar, Saint Joan, Milly Theale, Temple Drake, Eleanor of Aquitaine, one – 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

To have that sense of ones intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. – Joan Didion

Strength is one of those things youre supposed to have. You dont feel that you have it at the time youre going through it. – Joan Didion

Im not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel. – Joan Didion

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

I write entirely to find out what Im thinking, what Im looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. – Joan Didion

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

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

The wind shows us how close to the edge we are. – 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