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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
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Hard
Places
Writing
Safe
Always
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Dark
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More quotes by Joan Didion

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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
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A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
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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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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
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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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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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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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I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
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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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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
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Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
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Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
Joan Didion
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
Joan Didion
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When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
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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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