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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Dissatisfaction
Jealousy
Cure
Jealous
Cures
Self

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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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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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Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character X. I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.
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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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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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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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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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In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control.
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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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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I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
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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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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
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