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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

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Means
Write
Find
Mean
Writing
Fearless
Thinking
Entirely
Looking
Fear

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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
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To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
Joan Didion
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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
Joan Didion
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
Joan Didion
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we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
Joan Didion
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
Joan Didion
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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
Joan Didion
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
Joan Didion
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If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.
Joan Didion
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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
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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
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Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
Joan Didion
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
Joan Didion
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
Joan Didion
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Joan Didion
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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
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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
Joan Didion
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Joan Didion
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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