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Writers are always selling somebody out.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Writing
Always
Journalism
Selling
Writers
Somebody

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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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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.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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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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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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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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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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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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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. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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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.
Joan Didion
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
Joan Didion
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
Joan Didion
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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
Joan Didion
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Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
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