A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging. Wrong, I want to say. In fact, I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging. In fact, I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.

— Joan Didion

Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

— Joan Didion

Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested - ask any doctor - that it is not the most effective antianxiety agent yet known.

— Joan Didion

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.

— Joan Didion

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it... Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

— Joan Didion

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs... The way I write is who I am, or have become...

— Joan Didion

As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History. But of course I did not mention dread to Michael Laski, whose particular opiate is History. I did suggest “depression,” did venture that it might have been “depressing” for him to see only a dozen or so faces at his last May Day demonstration, but he told me that depression was an impediment to the revolutionary process, a disease afflicting only those who do not have ideology to sustain them.

— Joan Didion

Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is “nothing.

— Joan Didion

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion