Top 380 Joan Didion Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We are the stories we tell ourselves.”

— Joan Didion

Featured in: Short Quotes About Life, Reflection Quotes, Identity Quotes, Storytelling Quotes, Quotes About Stories

2. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

— Joan Didion

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

3. “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.”

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

5. “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.”

— Joan Didion

6. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.”

— Joan Didion

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

7. “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

8. “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

— Joan Didion

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”

— Joan Didion

13. “There’s a point when you go with what you’ve got. Or you don’t go.”

— Joan Didion

14. “When the ground starts moving, all bets are off.”

— Joan Didion

15. “Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.”

— Joan Didion

16. “We write to discover what we think.”

— Joan Didion

17. “Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

19. “Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.”

— Joan Didion

20. “You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.”

— Joan Didion

21. “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.”

— Joan Didion

22. “New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.”

— Joan Didion

Featured in: Quotes About New York

23. “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

— Joan Didion

Featured in: Betrayal Quotes

24. “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”

— Joan Didion

25. “That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”

— Joan Didion

26. “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

— Joan Didion

27. “I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.”

— Joan Didion

28. “The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it.”

— Joan Didion

29. “Writers are only rarely likable.”

— Joan Didion

30. “I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.”

— Joan Didion

Featured in: Quotes About New York

31. “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”

— Joan Didion

32. “That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.”

— Joan Didion

33. “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.”

— Joan Didion

34. “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

— Joan Didion

35. “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

36. “Writing is the act of saying “I,” of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying “listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.””

— Joan Didion

37. “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.”

— Joan Didion

38. “I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.”

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

40. “It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.”

— Joan Didion

Featured in: Quotes About New York

41. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.”

— Joan Didion

42. “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.”

— Joan Didion

43. “Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.”

— Joan Didion

44. “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”

— Joan Didion

45. “Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”

— Joan Didion

46. “Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”

— Joan Didion

47. “Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.”

— Joan Didion

48. “In the early years, you fight because you don’t understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.”

— Joan Didion

49. “If you want to understand what you’re thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.”

— Joan Didion

50. “The fear is for what is still to be lost.”

— Joan Didion