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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Five
Exile
Friends
Cuba
President
Flew
Night
Bags
Stills
Seven
Havana
Still
Gold
Revolver
General
Pajamas
Took
August

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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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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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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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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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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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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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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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When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
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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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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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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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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
Joan Didion
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Joan Didion
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
Joan Didion