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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Immediate
Extreme
Venality
Devotion
Allegorical
Extremes
Settlements
American
Settlement
Beautiful
Gratification
Vegas
Bizarre

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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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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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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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I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
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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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Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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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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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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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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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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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 was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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