Joan Didion

"Joan Didion was my idol and inspiration." —Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book
 
"Whenever I’m writing nonfiction I’ve always looked to Joan Didion really as my inspiration and can only get to a third of what she can do, and even that sounds high." —Bret Eason Ellis, author of American Psycho
 
“Joan Didion is not, of course, alone in her passionate investigation of the atomization of contemporary society. But she is one of the very few writers of our time who approaches her terrible subject with absolute seriousness, with fear and humility and awe. Her powerful irony is often sorrowful rather than clever.” —Joyce Carol Oates, author of We Were the Mulvaneys
 
"She was fearless, original and a marvelous observer. She was very skeptical of the conventional view and brilliant at finding the person or situation that was telling about the broader picture. She was a great reporter.” —Robert B. Silvers, founder of the New York Review of Books

“Joan Didion’s novels are a carefully designed frieze of the fracture and splinter in her characters’ comprehension of the world.” —Elizabeth Hardwick, author of Sleepless Nights

“Her sense of timing, sentence by sentence and in the arrangement of scenes, draws the reader forward. Her manner is deadpan funny, slicing away banality with an air that is ruthless yet meticulous. She uses few adjectives. The unshowy, nearly flat surface of her writing is rippled by patterns of repetition: an understatement that, like Hemingway’s, attains its own kind of drama. Repetition and observation narrate emotion by demonstrating it, so that restraint itself becomes poetic, even operatic.” —Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the United States of America and author of The Life of David

"Joan Didion doesn't waste bullets." —Teju Cole, author of Open City