Quotes from Joan Didion

Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.

The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.

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

It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.

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

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.

The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

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

A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.

My mother 'gave teas' the way other mothers breathed. Her own mother 'gave teas.' All of their friends 'gave teas,' each involving butter cookies extruded from a metal press and pastel bonbons ordered from See's.

I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance 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.

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.

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.

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.

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

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?

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

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.

There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self