Joan Didion

Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.

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.

I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.

You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.

Style is character.

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.

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.

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.

We all survive more than we think we can.

I lead a very conventional life.

A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.

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.

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

Call me the author.

Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.

I can remember, when I was in college, irritating deeply somebody I was going out with, because he would ask me what I was thinking and I would say I was thinking nothing. And it was true.

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.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

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.

Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean love in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.

When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends.

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.

I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.

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.

Nothing is critic-proof.

I am always writing to myself.

When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal.

Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't.

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.

All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.

To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.

I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.

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.

I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.

Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.

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.

I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man's soul.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

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.

I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.

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.

A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

My mother 'gave teas' the way other mothers breathed. Her own mother 'gave teas.' All of their friends 'gave teas,' each involving butter cookies extruded from a metal press and pastel bonbons ordered from See's.

I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.

I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.

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 do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.

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.

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.

Of course great hotels have always been social ideas flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.

In Brentwood we had a big safe-deposit box to put manuscripts in if we left town during fire season. It was such a big box that we never bothered to clean it out.

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.

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?

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.

There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.

Theres a general impulse to distract the grieving person as if you could.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense.

It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.

Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.

I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.

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.

The willingness to accept responsibility for ones own life is the source from which self respect springs.

The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

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

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.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.

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.

My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.

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.

I was raised an Episcopalian. And I did not and I don't believe that anyone is looking out for me personally.

Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.

You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.