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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Especially
Lines
Disparate
Upon
Imposition
Live
Images
Narrative
Entirely
Writers
Line

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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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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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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'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
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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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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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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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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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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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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
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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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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
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I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
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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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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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