I voraciously consume the quotes of my favorite writers for artistic direction on a routine basis.
Perhaps because writing is a solitary activity. Reading the words of these literary legends is akin to a roadmap of the psyche and a salve for the soul.
The words of literary legends comfort me because I know they have walked the same inner hallways of introspection and have grappled with the same preoccupations of self-worth.
The writing of James Baldwin keeps me buoyed in times of social unrest and confusion.
Toni Morrison unshackles my mind from all presumptions, keeping me raw and true and honest about topics like culture and love.
Sentiments from Angela Davis show exactly how oppression manifests itself in the world while reminding me that as far as justice is concerned, there is much left to be done.
And the words of Joan Didion? Well, the words of Joan Didion remind me why I write.
collage art by dennica pearl
For writers, we have to write. We must. There is no other way for us to release the electricity of inspiration that swells up with every new idea, lest it sit in our souls and lay dormant. Our hands are compelled to pick up the pen and our fingers are drawn by a seemingly magnetic force to our laptop keys.
The energy of our ideas must be released onto the page, much like how an athlete must channel their natural intensity into sport.
The weight of introversion, the compulsion to journal, the yearning to be heard. These are all things writers contend with and the elusive subjects that Didion writes about. She captures the spirit of the scribe most poignantly with her observations.
“See enough and write it down I tell myself,” Didion wrote in her collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the subject of keeping a notebook, “and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there.”
I feel seen when I read Didion’s writing, a master of the craft, she reminds me of the value of that inner voice intrinsic to all of us and that the act of writing is worth facing those inner dragons of self-doubt.
Here is a collection of some of my favorite quotes by Joan Didion on the art and experience of writing:
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
Joan Didion, Why I Write (1976)
“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.”
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2007)
“I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become.”
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2007)
“The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one’s own words in print.”
Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021)
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“When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges.”
Joan Didion, Why I Write (1976)
“The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.”
Joan Didion Interview, The Art of Nonfiction No. 71, The Paris Review (1978)
“Grammar is a piano I play by ear”
Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations (1984)
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, The White Album (1979)
“We live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria — which is our actual experience.”
Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)
collage art by dennica pearl
“I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe, it’s performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone.”
Joan Didion Interview, The Art of Nonfiction No. 71, The Paris Review (1978)
“I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.”
Joan Didion, Blue Nights (2012)
“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2007)
“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.”
Joan Didion, Why I Write (1976)
“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, The Year of Magical Thinking (2007)
collage art by dennica pearl
