Facts about Joan Didion

Occup.	Author
From	USA
Born	December 5, 1934
Age	90 years

Summary

Joan Didion is a famous Author from USA, he/she is 90 years old and still alive, born December 5, 1934.

Zodiac:

He/she is born under the zodiac sagittarius, who is known for Philosophical, Motion, Experimentation, Optimism. Our collection contains 29 quotes who is written / told by Joan.

Related authors: Susan Sontag (Author), Willie Morris (Writer), Gay Talese (Journalist)

29 Famous quotes by Joan Didion

"Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels 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"

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"

Joan Didion

"Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up"

Joan Didion

"Writers are always selling somebody out"

Joan Didion

"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

"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

"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

"You have to pick the places you don't walk away from"

Joan Didion

"Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?"

Joan Didion

"Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't"

Joan Didion

"Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power"

Joan Didion

"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

"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

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

Joan Didion

"In Brentwood we had a big safe-deposit box to put manuscripts in if we left town during fire season. It was such a big box that we never bothered to clean it out"

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

"The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs"

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

"Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service"

Joan Didion

"Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing"

Joan Didion

"Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant"

Joan Didion

"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

"Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting"

Joan Didion

"The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream"

Joan Didion

"We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget"

Joan Didion

"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

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

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

"Call me the author"

Joan Didion