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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Children
Much
Flat
Way
Flats
Never
Engage
Failed
Seemed
Child
Interest

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Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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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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I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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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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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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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
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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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In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
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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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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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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 know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
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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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