20 Essential Joan Didion Quotes That Will Make You Wish You Were A Writer

She's one of the greatest American writers of all time. Here are some of the most memorable things she's said and written in her legendary career.

1.

Via nymag.com

“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. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.” ― preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem

2.

Via fuckyeahjoandidion.tumblr.com

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” ― “On Keeping a Notebook”

3.

Via nymag.com

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” ― The Year of Magical Thinking

4.

Via welcometoladyville.com

“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.” ― “Why I Write”

5.

Via nprfreshair.tumblr.com

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.” ― The White Album

6.

Via theparisreview.org

“To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.” ― “On Self-Respect”

7.

Via nymag.com

“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.” ― A Book of Common Prayer

8.

Via vogue.com

“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.” ― 1975 commencement address at the University of California, Riverside

9.

Via wgbh.org

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death.” ― The Year of Magical Thinking

10.

Via achievement.org

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every word, all of it.” ― “Goodbye to All That”

11.

Via theawl.com

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” ― “On Self-Respect”

12.

Via theatlantic.com

“Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.” ― The White Album

13.

Via latimesblogs.latimes.com

“Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.” ― The Paris Review

14.

Via amandalovesyourstyle.blogspot.com

“To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.” ― “On Self-Respect”

15.

Via amandalovesyourstyle.blogspot.com

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.” ― The Year of Magical Thinking

16.

Via observer.com

“There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.” ― Where I Was From

17.

Via amandalovesyourstyle.blogspot.com

“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.” ― “On Self-Respect”

18.

Via observer.com

“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” ― “On Keeping a Notebook”

19.

Via nytimes.com

“In theory mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.” ― Blue Nights

20.

Via fuckyeahjoandidion.tumblr.com

“Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.” ― “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”