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We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Able
Things
Survive
Choice
Wouldn
Imagine
Choices
Fact
Facts

More quotes by Joan Didion

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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
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I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
Joan Didion
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Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
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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.
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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.
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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
Joan Didion
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
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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
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
Joan Didion
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Joan Didion
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Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
Joan Didion
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When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
Joan Didion