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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Joan Didion
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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Think
Adjusts
Thinking
Conforms
Conform
Fades
Memory
Memories
Remember
More quotes by Joan Didion
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Joan Didion
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
I don't know what I think until I write it down.
Joan Didion
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
Joan Didion
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
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
Joan Didion
I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
Joan Didion
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
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
Joan Didion
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
Joan Didion
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
Joan Didion
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
In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
Joan Didion
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
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
Joan Didion
Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
Joan Didion
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
I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
Joan Didion
Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
Joan Didion
Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
Joan Didion
