Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Back
Expectations
Self
Lies
Giving
Respect
Great
Lying
Free
Others
Power
Singular
Give
Ethics

More quotes by Joan Didion

Image
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Joan Didion
Image
I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
Joan Didion
Image
A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
Joan Didion
Image
He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
Joan Didion
Image
I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
Joan Didion
Image
You think you have some stable talent which 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.
Joan Didion
Image
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
Image
Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character X. I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.
Joan Didion
Image
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
Joan Didion
Image
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
Joan Didion
Image
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Joan Didion
Image
Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
Joan Didion
Image
It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
Joan Didion
Image
What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
Joan Didion
Image
I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
Joan Didion
Image
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Joan Didion
Image
Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
Joan Didion
Image
any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Joan Didion
Image
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
Joan Didion
Image
Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.
Joan Didion