Joan Didion

Sourced

• Writers are always selling somebody out. ("A Preface", in Slouching Toward Bethlehem)

• Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price. ("On Self-Respect", in Slouching Toward Bethlehem)

• The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs. ("On Self-Respect", in Slouching Toward Bethlehem)

• One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me. ("On the Mall", in The White Album)

• We tell ourselves stories in order to live. ("The White Album", in The White Album)

Unsourced

• 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.

• Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

• 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.

• In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.
  • Readers Digest, Quotable Quotes

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

• 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?

• We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

• I have never been sure what the word "nouveau" can possibly mean in America, implying as it does that the speaker is gazing down six hundred years of rolled lawns.