A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
– Joan Didion
A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
– 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
Call me the author.
– Joan Didion
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
– 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
Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.
– Joan Didion
Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
– Joan Didion
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
– Joan Didion
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.
– 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
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
– Joan Didion
Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life - is the source from which self respect springs.
– Joan Didion
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
– Joan Didion
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
– Joan Didion
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
– 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
I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.
– Joan Didion
Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.