Joan Didion
Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.Collection: Strength
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?Collection: Dreams
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.Collection: Power
It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.Collection: Christmas
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.Collection: Business
I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this plane and went to San Francisco, and the minute that plane lifted above the clouds, I felt this incredible sense of lightness.Collection: Amazing
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.Collection: Power
Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.Collection: Movies
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.Collection: Money
I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.Collection: Strength
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.Collection: Fear
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
I couldn't give away my husband's shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes - I don't know what it was about the shoes, but a lot of people have mentioned to me that shoes took on more meaning than we generally think they do... their attachment to the ground, I don't know - but that did have a real resonance for me.
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.
Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.
To make an omelette, you need not only those broken eggs but someone 'oppressed' to beat them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make 51 percent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class.
You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.
To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.
You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.
The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.
We all survive more than we think we can.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.
I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade.
The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.
A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions - leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways - those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California.
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance.
We imagine things - that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. We have no choice, so we do it.
Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
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?
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
In many ways, writing is the act of saying 'I,' of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, 'Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.' It's an aggressive, even a hostile act.
To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.
Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.
Memories are what you no longer want to remember.
Style is character.