Quote

The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.

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
Things
Wealth
Personal
Secret
Mobility
Point
Privacy
Freedom
Absolutes
Money
Absolute
Power
Sake
America
Neither

More quotes by Joan Didion

Image
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
Joan Didion
Image
Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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
Image
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Joan Didion
Image
What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
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
Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
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
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
Image
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
Joan Didion
Image
I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
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
Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
Joan Didion
Image
California: The west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
Image
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
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 willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion
Image
I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
Joan Didion
Image
What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
Joan Didion
Image
I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
Joan Didion