Top 380 Joan Didion Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”

— Joan Didion

53. “I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It’s a way of going underwater. I’ve always been interested in how deep it was, you know.”

— Joan Didion

54. “He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.”

— Joan Didion

55. “I don’t have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.”

— Joan Didion

56. “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

57. “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”

— Joan Didion

58. “To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self, an impossible claim that one should be at once Rose Bowl princess, medieval scholar, Saint Joan, Milly Theale, Temple Drake, Eleanor of Aquitaine, one.”

— Joan Didion

59. “What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?”

— Joan Didion

60. “What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”

— Joan Didion

61. “Water under the bridge and dynamite it behind you.”

— Joan Didion

62. “Anything worth having has its price.”

— Joan Didion

63. “To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.”

— Joan Didion

64. “Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.”

— Joan Didion

65. “Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.”

— Joan Didion

66. “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

67. “The ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.”

— Joan Didion

68. “Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.”

— Joan Didion

69. “People tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember. Writers are always selling somebody out.”

— Joan Didion

70. “You aren’t sure if you’re making the right decision – about anything, ever.”

— Joan Didion

71. “You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.”

— Joan Didion

72. “I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.”

— Joan Didion

73. “California: The west coast of Iowa.”

— Joan Didion

74. “I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.”

— Joan Didion

75. “I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen.”

— Joan Didion

76. “My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what’s going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.”

— Joan Didion

77. “Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.”

— Joan Didion

78. “I write to know what I think.”

— Joan Didion

79. “I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages.”

— Joan Didion

80. “Memories are what you no longer want to remember.”

— Joan Didion

81. “Information is control.”

— Joan Didion

82. “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

83. “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”

— Joan Didion

84. “Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.”

— Joan Didion

85. “Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.”

— Joan Didion

86. “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

87. “In terms of work, I never felt that I’ve done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.”

— Joan Didion

88. “The English social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1965 Death, Grief, and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new “ethical duty to enjoy oneself,” a novel “imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others.”

— Joan Didion

89. “I have not been the witness I wanted to be.”

— Joan Didion

90. “Short stories demand a certain awareness of one’s own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.”

— Joan Didion

91. “Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?”

— Joan Didion

92. “As it happened, I didn’t grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.”

— Joan Didion

93. “Someday it all comes.”

— Joan Didion

94. “I’m totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.”

— Joan Didion

95. “I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right.”

— Joan Didion

96. “The last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up.”

— Joan Didion

97. “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.”

— Joan Didion

98. “I have never started a novel – I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel – I’ve never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.”

— Joan Didion

99. “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

100. “It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.”

— Joan Didion