Quote

A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Long
Moment
Dress
Woman
Lays
Riviera
White
Dresses
Halter
Tell
Begin
Casino
Moments
Short
Casinos
Young
Hair
Vegas
Play
Walks
Gambling
Made
Morning
Precisely

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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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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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We all survive more than we think we can.
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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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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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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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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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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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I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
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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 write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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