A collection of quotes and thoughts by Joan Didion on magical, thinking, goodbye, white-album, California, life, change, work, self-respect, walk, sky, time and writing.
26 Inspiring Quotes By Joan Didion For Those Scuffling With Their Creative Pursuits
Quick Facts
Famous As:
Screenwriter, Novelist, Journalist, Writer, Essayist
Joan Didion is a prominent American journalist and writer renowned for her screenplays, novels and autobiographical works. She is distinguished for her memoirs and literary journalism. Her thoughts, work, writings, views, and opinions traverse the cultural chaos and disintegration of the country’s morals. The preponderant theme of her works is social and individual fragmentation. She attained the zenith of success for her writings that defined American subcultures for conventional audiences. She bagged in ‘The National Book Award for Nonfiction’ in 2005. She was also a finalist for, ‘Pulitzer Prize’ and ‘National Book Critics Circle Award’ for her book titled, ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’. In order to celebrate the ways she helped us make sense of it all, we have compiled some quotable quotes and sayings by the prolific writer. Read through the quotes and thoughts by Joan Didion from whatever she has said or written in her legendary career.
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.
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
Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
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.
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. 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
The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this plane and went to San Francisco, and the minute that plane lifted above the clouds, I felt this incredible sense of lightness.
