Explore

writing history and literature lit culture and society Ernest Hemingway F. Scott Fitzgerald Susan Sontag Joan Didion Ray Bradbury Kurt Vonnegut George Orwell Susan Orlean Walter Benjamin Henry Miller Anais Nin David Ogilvy Isabel Allende Stephen King H. P. Lovecraft Malcolm Cowley John Steinbeck Herbert Spencer E. B. White Mary Karr Ann Patchett Mary Gordon Joseph Conrad Margaret Atwood David Foster Wallace Neil Gaiman

Famous Advice on Writing

The collected wisdom of great writers, including Vonnegut, Hemingway, Didion, Sontag, Fitzgerald, Orwell, Kerouac, Atwood, Steinbeck, and more:

Joan Didion quote art and design illustration Lisa Congdon history and literature lit thought and opinion

Joan Didion, reconstructionist

thought and opinion history and literature lit Joan Didion culture and society quote

A certain amount of resistance is good for anybody. It keeps you awake.

Joan Didion

writing Joan Didion interviews history and literature lit

I can recall disapproving of the golden mean, always thinking there was more to be learned from the dark journey. The dark journey engaged me more.

Joan Didion on writing in a 1977 interview – a sentiment Joy Williams would come to echo three decades later in her essay on why writers write. Also see Didion herself on the same question.

Joan Didion writing thought and opinion history and literature lit media and communication interviews

I think of writing anything at all as a kind of high-wire act. The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities. Unless you’re Henry James.

Joan Didion, 1977. Also see Didion’s Why I Write and the author on the importance of keeping a notebook.

thought and opinion Joan Didion history and literature lit writing

I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages.

Joan Didion, and other beloved writers, on their writing routines. Also see Didion on keeping a notebook.

Joan Didion thought and opinion history and literature culture and society quote lit psychology

Joan Didion on keeping a notebook

writing Joan Didion history and literature lit thought and opinion media and communication

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences.

Joan Didion on writing

quote history and literature writing Joan Didion lit thought and opinion

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.

Joan Didion on why she writes, a must-read.

writing Joan Didion thought and opinion history and literature lit

Doing what you love allows you to remember so well, to feel so closely how you have loved, that you can forget the space between yourself and the words you draw with. Forget the distance between you and everything, everyone, else. Love becomes transmutable. Freud knew this. Writing can be an effective replacement mechanism—and in its solitude, there is antidote for the deepest loneliness.

Meeting Joan Didion – beautiful short essay by Lucy McKeon.

Also see how to find your purpose and do what you love.