I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage. – 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
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. – Joan Didion
All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don’t do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it’s very different to have the responsibility of a child. – Joan Didion
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. – Joan Didion
One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they’re crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don’t make sense. – Joan Didion
I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I’ve already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That’s very discouraging. I hate the book at that point. – Joan Didion
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. – Joan Didion
I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. – 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
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
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. – Joan Didion
I have a theatrical temperament. I’m not interested in the middle road – maybe because everyone’s on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me. – 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
A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions – leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways – those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California. – Joan Didion
The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black. – Joan Didion
Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service. – Joan Didion
To make an omelette, you need not only those broken eggs but someone ‘oppressed’ to beat them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make 51 percent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class. – 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
Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up. – Joan Didion
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. – Joan Didion
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something… but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen. – Joan Didion
The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control. – Joan Didion