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Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
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Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Self
Opportunity
Judgment
Limiting
First
Making
Films
Fees
Many
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Judgments
Way
Film
Beyond
Lectures
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Levels
Occupation
Littles
Question
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Vaporous
Little
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Obvious
Careerism
Firsts
Anyone
Criticism
Peculiarly

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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
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Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to 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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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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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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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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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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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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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
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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 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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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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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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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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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
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You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.
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