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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Choices
Fact
Facts
Able
Things
Survive
Choice
Wouldn
Imagine

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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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I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
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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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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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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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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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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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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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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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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.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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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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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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Information is control.
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