Quote

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Within
Locked
Ability
Indifference
Paradoxically
Sense
Lack
Discriminate
Everything
Remain
Intrinsic
Self
Oneself
Constitutes
Love
Worth
Potentially
Respect
Incapable
Either
Indifferent

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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.
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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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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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To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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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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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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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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I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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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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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
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