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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Head
Suggested
Antidote
Crying
Bags
Cry
Paper

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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
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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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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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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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Information is control.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
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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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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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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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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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