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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Think
Thinking
Like
Anybody
People
Parents
Ought
Parent
Feels
Good

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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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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.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
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Information is control.
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The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
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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.
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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.
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I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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I lead a very conventional life.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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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.
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we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
Joan Didion