It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Wealth
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Morality, Morals
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Water
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Memory
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self, an impossible claim that one should be at once Rose Bowl princess, medieval scholar, Saint Joan, Milly Theale, Temple Drake, Eleanor of Aquitaine, one
—Joan Didion
Topics: Jealousy
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Envy, Jealousy
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Wealth
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
—Joan Didion
Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Travel
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
—Joan Didion
There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devote more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Hollywood
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.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Possessions, Property
The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Self-respect, Acceptance, Responsibility, Character
There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Science Fiction
We all have the same dreams.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Teamwork
Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Twentieth Century
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.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Travel
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.
—Joan Didion
Topics: Self-respect, Respect, Confidence, Assurance, Self Respect
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Annie Dillard American Writer
- Isabel Allende Chilean Novelist
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Maxine Hong Kingston American Novelist, Memoirist
- Joyce Maynard American Novelist
- Anne Lamott American Writer
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Alice Walker American Novelist, Activist
- Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
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