Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
Joan Didion
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Good
Think
Thinking
Anybody
Like
Parents
People
Ought
Parent
Feels
More quotes by Joan Didion
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
I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.
Joan Didion
Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
Joan Didion
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
Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
Joan Didion
You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
Joan Didion
Information is control.
Joan Didion
Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
Joan Didion
We all survive more than we think we can.
Joan Didion
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion
We are the stories we tell ourselves
Joan Didion
Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
Joan Didion
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
Joan Didion
California: The west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
Joan Didion
What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
Joan Didion
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
Joan Didion
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
Joan Didion
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Joan Didion
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
