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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Adult
Romantic
Ethics
Adults
Came
Life
Equipped
Ethic
Essentially

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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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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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There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
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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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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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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 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.
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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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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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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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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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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I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
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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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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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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 hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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