Joan Didion Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• 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

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Jul 03, 2011

• Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Focus, Stories

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Feb 22, 2014

• Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.

  Joan Didion

  Blessed, Writing, Mind

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Oct 17, 2012

• We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Order, Stories

  1979 The White Album,'The White Album, 1'.

• To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Cameras, Structure

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Jul 27, 2011

• 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.

  Joan Didion

  Notebook, Daughter, Lonely

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.98, Zola Books

• Writers are always selling somebody out.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Journalism, Selling

  Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968) p. xvi

• 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.

  Joan Didion

  Notebook, Lonely, Children

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.98, Zola Books

• I don't know what I think until I write it down.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Thinking, Knows

  "Joan Didion Survives 'The Year of Magical Thinking'". Interview with Susan Stamberg, www.npr.org. September 30, 2005.

• Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. 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.

  Joan Didion

  Blessed, Writing, Mean

• Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Answers, Novel

  Joan Didion (1984). “Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations”

• Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

  Joan Didion

  Dream, Writing

• I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Catharsis

• The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Trying, Doe

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.98, Zola Books

• We write to discover what we think.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Thinking

• 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

  Writing, Different, Fiction

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Sep 23, 2011

• Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Sculpture, Research

  "Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1". Interview with Hilton Als, www.theparisreview.org. 2006.

• My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Filling In, Process

• Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Elements, Performances

  Interview with Sheila Heti, www.believermag.com. December, 2011.

• The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.

  Joan Didion

  Home, Writing, Trying

• It occurs to me as I write that this "white light," usually presented dippily (evidence of afterlife, higher power), is in fact precisely consistent with the oxygen deficit that occurs as blood flow to the brain decreases. "Everything went white," those whose blood pressure has dropped say of the instant before they faint.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Afterlife, White

  Joan Didion (2007). “The Year of Magical Thinking”, p.156, Vintage

• As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become.

  Joan Didion

  Children, Writing, Who I Am

• When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.

  Joan Didion

  Children, Writing, Wish

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Mar 10, 2012

• There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Leaving, Pieces

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.7, Zola Books

• If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Thinking, Want

  Interview with Sheila Heti, www.believermag.com. December, 2011.

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