Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there’s always some drive in it that is entirely personal – even if you don’t know it while you’re doing it. – Joan Didion
Not many people were speaking truth to power in the ’80s. I had a really good time doing it – I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It’s challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing ‘Democracy’ particularly. – Joan Didion
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. – Joan Didion
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. – Joan Didion
Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another. – Joan Didion
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. – 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
In many ways, writing is the act of saying ‘I,’ of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, ‘Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.’ It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. – 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
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
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
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting. – 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
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. – 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
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
You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you’re writing, and if it doesn’t seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can’t imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence. – Joan Didion
A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye. – Joan Didion
When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends. – Joan Didion
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. – Joan Didion
