Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Stills
Still
Fear
Lost
More quotes by Joan Didion
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
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
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
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
Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
Joan Didion
[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
Joan Didion
Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
Joan Didion
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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
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
He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
Joan Didion
Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
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
I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
Joan Didion
There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Joan Didion
I lead a very conventional life.
Joan Didion
Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
Joan Didion
I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control.
Joan Didion