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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Whole
World
Grieving
Empty
Missing
Single
Persons
Person

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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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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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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
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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 forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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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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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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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 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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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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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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Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
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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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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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