Quote

Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.

Joan Didion

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Voice
Indelibly
Hard
Burroughs
Inventive
Poetic
Serious
American
Free
Funny
Derisive

More quotes by Joan Didion

Image
Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
Joan Didion
Image
I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
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
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
To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
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
I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion
Image
There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
Joan Didion
Image
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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
[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
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Joan Didion
Image
There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
Joan Didion
Image
I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Joan Didion
Image
You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.
Joan Didion
Image
Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
Joan Didion