Latest Joan Didion Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.

  Joan Didion

  Pain, Eye, Scary

• I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.

  Joan Didion

  Running, Giving Up, Crazy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Once in a while there were things in screenwriting that taught me things for fiction. But there's nothing in screenwriting that teaches you anything for the theater. I'm not sure I've ever fully appreciated before how different a form theater is.

  Joan Didion

  Different, Appreciated, Teach

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.

  Joan Didion

  Kind, Natural, Deranged

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Discovery still happens in the writing. You start in nonfiction with a whole lot more going for you, because all the discovery isn't waiting to be made. You've made some of it in the research. As you get deeper into a piece and do more research, the notes are in the direction of the piece - you're actually writing it.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Waiting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.

  Joan Didion

  Different, Done, Want

• I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Typewriters, Use

• Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.

  Joan Didion

  Block, Writing, Knowing

• Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.

  Joan Didion

  Simple, Thinking, Pieces

• If you are doing a piece about somebody, even if you admire them tremendously and express that in the piece, express that admiration, if they're not used to being written about, if they're civilians, [...] they're not used to seeing themselves through other people's eyes. So you will always see them from a slightly different angle than they see themselves, and they feel a little betrayed by that.

  Joan Didion

  Eye, People, Different

  Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

• When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Looks, May

  Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

• I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything every day, but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day.

  Joan Didion

  Sometimes, Accomplish, Ifs

  Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

• Everybody who undergoes a death and finds themselves grieving is obsessed with — or maybe overly focused on — the idea that they can’t display self-pity, they have to be strong. Actually there are a lot of reasons why you are going to feel sorry for yourself, but that’s your first concern.

  Joan Didion

  Strong, Sorry, Grieving

  "National Book Award". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

• I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape

  Joan Didion

  Block, Different, Fiction

  "National Book Award". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

• When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Color, Water

  Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

• I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write.

  Joan Didion

  Summer, Writing, Self Love

  Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

• I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can't read it in one sitting, you're going to lose the rhythm of it. You're going to lose the shape of it.

  Joan Didion

  Sitting, Shapes, Want

  Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

• I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are very urgent to children.

  Joan Didion

  Children, Crazy, Reading

  Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

• I just read everything I could get my hands on. I taught myself to read or my mother taught me. Who knows how I learned to read? It was before I went to school, so I would go to the library and just take things off the shelf. My mother had to sign a piece of paper saying I could take adult books.

  Joan Didion

  Mother, Book, School

  Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

• I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.

  Joan Didion

  Marine, Sea, Unseen

  Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

• I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

  Joan Didion

  Underwater, Way, Wanted

  Source: www.believermag.com

• There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Feels

  Interview with Sheila Heti, www.believermag.com. December, 2011.

• Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Thinking, Blue

  Interview with Sheila Heti, www.believermag.com. December, 2011.

• If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Thinking, Want

  Interview with Sheila Heti, www.believermag.com. December, 2011.

• I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.

  Joan Didion

  Commitment, Motherhood, Way

  Interview with Sheila Heti, www.believermag.com. December, 2011.