Joan Didion Quotes

• I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance.

  Joan Didion

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• I was raised an Episcopalian. And I did not and I don’t believe that anyone is looking out for me personally.

  Joan Didion

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• You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you’re writing, and if it doesn’t seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can’t imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.

  Joan Didion

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• 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

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• Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn’t put it down – I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.

  Joan Didion

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• 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

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• 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.

  Joan Didion

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• The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities.

  Joan Didion

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• The year of magical thinking.

  Joan Didion

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

  Joan Didion

• It’s always something minor. Some bit of information. Some interesting development. I think it hits people forever.

  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.

  Joan Didion

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

  Joan Didion

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  Tags in Writing, Dreaming, Find

• There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.

  Joan Didion

• That’s something we have to feel out. It occurred to me to begin with, as a way of taking it a step further, but there’s another argument that the step further may be a bridge too far.

  Joan Didion

• There’s hardly anything I can say about this except thank you.

  Joan Didion

• Hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back.

  Joan Didion

• Life changes fast, … Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

  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

• You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.

  Joan Didion

Joan Didion (80)

Birth:	5th December, 1934
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Essayist, Journalist, Memoirist, Novelist, Screenwriter

About

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California, USA. She is an American essayist, journalist, memoirist, novelist and screenwriter best known for her novels and her literary journalism. She earned a BA degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956. She served as a Copywriter and Editor for Vogue from 1956-1963. She has written several novels include: Run, River, Play It as It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy, and The Last Thing He Wanted. Her nonfiction works, including Slouching Towards Bethlehem (essays), The White Album (essays), Salvador (essays), After Henry (essays), Political Fictions (essays), Where I Was From (essays), The Year of Magical Thinking (memoir, Won- National Book Award for Nonfiction 2005. Nominations- Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir/Autobiography), and Blue Nights (memoir). She has written several films include: The Panic in Needle Park, Such Good Friends, Play It as It Lays, A Star Is Born, True Confessions, and Up Close and Personal. She received many awards, including St. Louis Literary Award, Evelyn F. Burkey Award, and National Medals of Arts and Humanities.

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