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Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Lasts
Last
Right
Always
Life
Word

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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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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.
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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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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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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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Information is control.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
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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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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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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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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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What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion