Joan Didion

Novelist, Author

1934 – 2021

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Who was Joan Didion?

Joan Didion was 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.

Famous Quotes:

  • The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
  • The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
  • Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.
  • We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
  • 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.

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Born
Dec 5, 1934
Sacramento, CA
Parents
Spouses
Children
Ethnicity
  • White American
Education
  • Bachelor of Arts, University of California, Berkeley
    ( - 1956)
Lived in
  • Sacramento
Died
Dec 23, 2021
New York, NY

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

Modified by JokerGem
on December 10, 2023

Citation

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"Joan Didion." Biographies.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.biographies.net/people/en/joan_didion>.

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