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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Another
Veterans
Wells
Veteran
Well
Cups
Never
Coffee
Understood
Along
War
Guerrilla
Mother
Guerrillas

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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
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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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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
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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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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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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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To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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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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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.
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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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