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California: The west coast of Iowa.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
West
Iowa
Coast
California

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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
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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.
Joan Didion
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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
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Joan Didion
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
Joan Didion
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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
Joan Didion
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
Joan Didion
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
Joan Didion
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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
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
Joan Didion
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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Joan Didion
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Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
Joan Didion
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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
Joan Didion
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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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
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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
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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
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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
Joan Didion