Joan Didion Quotes (37 Quotes)

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

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.

Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.

The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

I never had to finish sentences because he would finish them for me, ... I never got why. What was good for him was good for me. What was good for me was good for him. I don't understand what school of marriage they're thinking about.

Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.

I'm not sure I would have anyway, ... If I had been writing it at the time she died, that would have become part of it. It was about a specific period of going crazy and getting over it.

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him, ... This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.

We were that generation called ''silent,'' but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.

Western Attitudes Toward Death.

Call me the author.

I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

The shock of it was that this time, she had a lot of strength, ... Her husband and I assumed she'd overcome it.

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

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. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.

A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.

A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

In her devastating new book, The Year of Magical Thinking, ... cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the peo

hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

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.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

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?

That's something we have to feel out. It occurred to me to begin with, as a way of taking it a step further, but there's another argument that the step further may be a bridge too far.

Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devote more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.

You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.

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.

It's always something minor. Some bit of information. Some interesting development. I think it hits people forever.