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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Delusion
Innocence
Likes
Oneself
Ends
Disillusionment
Stripped

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We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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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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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
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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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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
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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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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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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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There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.
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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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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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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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