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

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Would
Life
Like
Tended
Fantasies
Spectacular
Fantasy

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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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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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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character X. I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.
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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.
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Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
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I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
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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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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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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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I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
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