Joan Didion
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"Joan Didion" is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.

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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.

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California: The west coast of Iowa.

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

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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

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

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Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

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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.

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That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth... is potentially to have everything...

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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.

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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

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