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: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
America
Neither
Things
Wealth
Personal
Secret
Mobility
Point
Privacy
Freedom
Absolutes
Money
Absolute
Power
Sake

More quotes by Joan Didion

Image
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
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
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
Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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
Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
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
Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
Joan Didion
Image
Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
Joan Didion
Image
Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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 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
Image
Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
Joan Didion
Image
we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
Joan Didion
Image
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
Joan Didion
Image
Writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion
Image
I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
Joan Didion
Image
I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
Joan Didion