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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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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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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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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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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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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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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
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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 know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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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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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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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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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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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.
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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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