Joan Didion Quotes

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.

A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.

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.

Call me the author.

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.

Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

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