Joan Didion

Joan Didion (December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer known as a novelist, journalist and prose stylist.

Quotes

The wind shows us how close to the edge we are
- from Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Writers are always selling somebody out.
- "A Preface", in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
- "On Self-Respect", in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
- "On Self-Respect", in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

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?
- From the novel Run, River

One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me.
- "On the Mall", in The White Album

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
- "The White Album", in The White Album

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.
- The White Album^[1]

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.
- "The Howard Hughes Underground," The Saturday Evening Post (23 August 1967)
- "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38," Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

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. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
- "Why I Write" (1975)

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned.
- "Why I Write" (1975)

When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges.
- "Why I Write" (1975)

Her nonfiction is so compelling. She finds exactly the right words that she needs to establish setting and character and not one word more.
- Kathleen Alcalá Interview (2021)

...anxiety was her schtick. She applies her anxiety to everything. And when she’s got it in balance it's brilliant. And when she doesn’t, when her anxiety becomes the subject, it’s lousy.
- Vivian Gornick Interview (2021)

("Who are some of the women writers around who are not feminists, who are simply writers, or even doing a disservice to the feminist cause?") I think an example would be Joan Didion. First, I have to say I dislike the word cause. I think she does a disservice to the feminist cause, to any progressive cause, and also to the clarity of language. I've read a couple of her books. I don't know anything about her except she's from California. Well, I mean, so is Tillie. Just goes to show. I think her style is very... sentimental really. And indirect and opaque.
- 1981 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley

with Didion I really just feel moral, political, stylistic differences. People think she's such a great stylist, but I don't. I think she's sentimental. I mean, she doesn't overwrite. She doesn't do that at all. I will say that for her. But I don't like her attitude towards people, you know. I don't think she really illuminates them but darkens them so that we see them less by the time we're through. Maybe in the beginning we see them a little bit but by the end we really don't see them. And I don't think she wants us to. And I think that's a political thing.
- 1981 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley

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Joan Didion