Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. Joan Didion More Quotes by Joan Didion More Quotes From Joan Didion I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic. Joan Didion ethicsadults To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth... is potentially to have everything... Joan Didion 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. 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 livelifebelieveway Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing. Joan Didion downyouresearchmatter It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento. Joan Didion nevermechristmaspeople I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man's soul. Joan Didion problemsmansoulfaith The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. Joan Didion wordsyoumindlong
