Quote

California: The west coast of Iowa.

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
Iowa
Coast
California
West

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
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
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
New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
Joan Didion
Image
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
Joan Didion
Image
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
Joan Didion
Image
Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.
Joan Didion
Image
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
Image
Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
Joan Didion
Image
Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
Image
[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
Image
Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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
If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
Joan Didion
Image
I lead a very conventional life.
Joan Didion
Image
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion
Image
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
Image
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
Image
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
Joan Didion
Image
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
Joan Didion