Quote

We all survive more than we think we can.

Joan Didion

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Survive
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Joan Didion

Image
I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
Joan Didion
Image
Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
Joan Didion
Image
The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
Joan Didion
Image
If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
Joan Didion
Image
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
Joan Didion
Image
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.
Joan Didion
Image
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
Joan Didion
Image
He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
Joan Didion
Image
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
Image
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
Joan Didion
Image
Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
Joan Didion
Image
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
Joan Didion
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Joan Didion
Image
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
Joan Didion
Image
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
Image
Anything worth having has its price.
Joan Didion
Image
I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
Joan Didion
Image
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