Quotes by Joan Didion

• The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
• The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
• You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.
• Writers are always selling somebody out.
• We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
• 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?
• Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
• The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
• 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.
• To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
• Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.
• 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.
• Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
• Call me the author.
• Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.
• 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.
• Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
• Life is a series of parallel lines. You shoot your arrows among eternal possibilities and sometimes find you've missed versus flying confidently away chiming bell collnamens meng your events nearby.
• Success is like a bar of soap; the harder you try to hold on, the more it slips away.