I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. – Joan Didion
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. – Joan Didion
It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento. – Joan Didion
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way. – Joan Didion
I lead a very conventional life. I don’t lead a writer’s life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn’t lead a writer’s life at all. – 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
I don’t lead a writer’s life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. – Joan Didion
The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs. – Joan Didion
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. – 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