Quotes from Joan Didion

Time is the school in which we learn.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time.

Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.

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.

My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.

I lead a very conventional life.

I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.

I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.

I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.

We imagine things - that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. We have no choice, so we do it.

Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.

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

I couldn't give away my husband's shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes - I don't know what it was about the shoes, but a lot of people have mentioned to me that shoes took on more meaning than we generally think they do... their attachment to the ground, I don't know - but that did have a real resonance for me.

It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade.

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.

To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.

I can remember, when I was in college, irritating deeply somebody I was going out with, because he would ask me what I was thinking and I would say I was thinking nothing. And it was true.

It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.

I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.

I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance.

There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.

The truth is, it's easier for me to write than talk... to express the state I'm in at any time.

I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.

Writers are always selling somebody out.