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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
West
Late
Stuff
Ends
Coast
Afternoon
Brilliant
Sky

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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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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.
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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.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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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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Anything worth having has its price.
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New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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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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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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What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
Joan Didion
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
Joan Didion
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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 live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
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