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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Join
Moral
Start
Something
Imperative
Thinking
Madmen
Imperatives
Fashionable
Deceiving

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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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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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When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
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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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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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I lead a very conventional life.
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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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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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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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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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[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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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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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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I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control.
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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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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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