Top 380 Joan Didion Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.”

— Joan Didion

102. “I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. I think biographies are very urgent to children.”

— Joan Didion

103. “When you’re writing fiction, you don’t have notes necessarily. You don’t carve it, it’s not like a piece of sculpture, it’s more like water color.”

— Joan Didion

104. “We all have the same dreams.”

— Joan Didion

105. “Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.”

— Joan Didion

106. “I lead a very conventional life.”

— Joan Didion

107. “It’s hard to find a book that’s safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.”

— Joan Didion

108. “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.”

— Joan Didion

109. “There’s a general impulse to distract the grieving person – as if you could.”

— Joan Didion

110. “Nonfiction is more personal for me. It’s more personal in that it’s more direct, and actually it’s always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.”

— Joan Didion

111. “We all remember what we need to remember.”

— Joan Didion

112. “As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs.”

— Joan Didion

113. “It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come – was anyone ever so young?”

— Joan Didion

114. “I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John.”

— Joan Didion

115. “I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?”

— Joan Didion

116. “You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.”

— Joan Didion

117. “Becoming a parent is actually terrifying. A lot of people have that feeling about their dogs. And if you’re the kind of person who’s going to have that feeling about a dog you’re definitely going to have that about a child.”

— Joan Didion

118. “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.”

— Joan Didion

119. “One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.”

— Joan Didion

120. “Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.”

— Joan Didion

121. “Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age.”

— Joan Didion

122. “It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes.”

— Joan Didion

123. “Just an ordinary day. “And then – gone.”

— Joan Didion

124. “I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”

— Joan Didion

125. “I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.”

— Joan Didion

126. “Always when I play back my father’s voice,” Maria says, “it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.”

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

128. “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.”

— Joan Didion

129. “I work every day. Sometimes I don’t accomplish anything every day, but if I don’t work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day.”

— Joan Didion

130. “I am what I am. To look for reasons is beside the point.”

— Joan Didion

131. “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

132. “There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”

— Joan Didion

133. “Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.”

— Joan Didion

134. “Aging and its evidence remain lifes most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.”

— Joan Didion

135. “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

136. “A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.”

— Joan Didion

137. “In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.”

— Joan Didion

138. “My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”

— Joan Didion

139. “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

140. “Nei momenti difficili, mi era stato insegnato fin dall’infanzia, leggi, impara, datti da fare, rivolgiti alla letteratura. Essere informati significava non perdere il controllo.”

— Joan Didion

141. “I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I’m not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?”

— Joan Didion

142. “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”

— Joan Didion

143. “Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.”

— Joan Didion

144. “And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I.”

— Joan Didion

145. “Some women fight and others do not. Like so many successful guerrillas in the war between the sexes, Georgia O’Keeffe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove.”

— Joan Didion

146. “I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.”

— Joan Didion

147. “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

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

— Joan Didion

149. “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.”

— Joan Didion

150. “To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.”

— Joan Didion