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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Mind
Sky
Continent
Things
Meet
Continents
Ineradicable
Loss
Suspicion
Bleached
Sense
Mentality
Suspension
Running
Immense
Boom
Place
Beneath
Uneasy
Better
Buried
Work
California
Troubled

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I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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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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Anything worth having has its price.
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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
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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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Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
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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.
Joan Didion
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The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
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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.
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.
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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.
Joan Didion
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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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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
Joan Didion