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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Short
Focus
Stories
Narrowing
Certain
Intentions
Writing
Intention
Demand
Awareness

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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
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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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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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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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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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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
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Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
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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 did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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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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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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