Quote

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

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
Wells
Attractive
Well
Terms
People
Company
Term
Amends
Whether
Bethlehem
Keep
Nodding
Used
Advised
Find
Deserted

More quotes by Joan Didion

Image
I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
Joan Didion
Image
Writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion
Image
For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
Joan Didion
Image
We are the stories we tell ourselves
Joan Didion
Image
We all survive more than we think we can.
Joan Didion
Image
My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
Joan Didion
Image
I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
Image
I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.
Joan Didion
Image
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Joan Didion
Image
I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
Joan Didion
Image
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
Image
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
Joan Didion
Image
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
Image
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
Joan Didion
Image
California: The west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
Image
I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
Joan Didion
Image
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
Joan Didion
Image
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