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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
West
Land
Called
Sometimes
Lancaster
Iowa
Promised
Coast
California

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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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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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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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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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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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Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
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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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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 fear is for what is still to be lost.
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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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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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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
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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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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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