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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Love
Still
Stay
Ideas
Leave
Ever
Clear
Sixty
Book
Start
Finish
Sometimes
Talking
Fifty
Much
Idea
Calling
Something
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Character
Characters

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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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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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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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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 ... 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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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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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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Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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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've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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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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