Joan Didion

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American writer renowned as a novelist, journalist and prose stylist.

Quotes

• Writers are always selling somebody out.
  • "A Preface", in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

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

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

• 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?
  • From the novel Run, River

• 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

• 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.
  • The White Album^[1]

• 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.
  • "The Howard Hughes Underground," The Saturday Evening Post (23 August 1967)
  • "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38," Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

External links

• 2005 audio interview of Joan Didion by Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio - RealAudio
• 1987 audio interview of Joan Didion by Don Swaim
• CBC: Didion wins U.S. National Book Award
• The New York Review of Books: Joan Didion
• The Paris Review Interview with Joan Didion, 2006
• The Paris Review Interview with Joan Didion, 1978
• Joan-Didion.info: Joan Didion Fan Site