15 Joan Didion Quotes on Life, Love, and Writing
Joan Didion was a singular voice in 20th-century American literature. A writer of essays, articles, memoirs, plays, and novels, she captured life at its ugliest and most beautiful, covering everything from grief to politics to travel and culture.
Her first success as a young writer came during her senior year at the University of California, Berkeley, when she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue, which led to a job in the magazine’s New York office in 1956.
She worked for seven years at the publication, eventually becoming an associate features editor, all while writing and publishing her own work. Her first novel, Run River, debuted in 1963, one year before she left Vogue, married fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, and moved to Los Angeles.
Much of Didion’s work after that focused on her experiences and impressions of life in California. Along with luminaries including Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe, Didion pioneered a different kind of reporting, called New Journalism, wherein writers embraced a more subjective perspective, often inserting themselves into their stories.
Didion, for her part, wrote about 1960s counterculture in California, sharing her incisive observations in her first nonfiction book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, published in 1968.
The authoress further established herself as a towering literary figure over the next several decades, writing four additional novels, multiple plays and screenplays, and countless articles and essays, many of which were collected into books such as The White Album and Political Fictions. She also earned acclaim for her memoirs, most notably 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which recounted her experience with grief following her husband’s sudden death in 2003.
Didion’s final book, a collection of essays titled Let Me Tell You What I Mean, was published in January 2021, just months before her death from Parkinson’s the following December at age 87. A consummate observer of human nature, she left behind a collection of work that continues to inspire. The 15 quotes below are evidence of that.
On Life
On Love
On Writing
