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I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Line
Cleared
Learned
Unnoticed
Lines
Surveillance
Death
Brush
Away
Brushes
Keep
Ground
Might
Sight
Early
Coil

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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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Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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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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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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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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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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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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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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[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
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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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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
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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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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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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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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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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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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.
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