Joan Didion was born on December 5, 1934. She is an American writer who started her career after winning an essay contest sponsored by Vogue Magazine in the 1960s. Her writings were generally political that was concentrated on the subtext of social and political rhetoric.
Her writings often engaged the audience in the lifestyle and counterculture of the 60’s Hollywood. She wrote the earliest mainstream media article in 1991 to suggest the wrongful conviction of Central Park Five. For the autobiography/biography “The Year of Magical Thinking,” she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
In 2005 she also won the National Book Award for Non-fiction. She was profiled for the Netflix documentary The Centre Will Not Hold, where she discusses her professional and personal life. The tragedy of her husband’s and daughter’s death are explored in her books, Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking.
Joan Didion Quotes
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.- Joan Didion
Do not whine… Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.- Joan Didion
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.- Joan Didion
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.- Joan Didion
The ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.- Joan Didion
Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.- Joan Didion
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.- Joan Didion
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.- Joan Didion
Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having,has a price.- Joan Didion
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.- Joan Didion