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.

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.

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.

To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.

Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it

I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.

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.

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.

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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.

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.

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.

A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.