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

“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.”

“2005 audio interview of Joan Didion by Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio - RealAudio”

“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.”

“The New York Review of Books: Joan Didion”

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

“Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?”