Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.
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.
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. 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.
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.
To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.
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.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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.
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
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.
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.
To make an omelette, you need not only those broken eggs but someone 'oppressed' to beat them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make 51 percent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class.
I couldn't give away my husband's shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes - I don't know what it was about the shoes, but a lot of people have mentioned to me that shoes took on more meaning than we generally think they do... their attachment to the ground, I don't know - but that did have a real resonance for me.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
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.
You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.
I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.
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.
I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends.
I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
We all survive more than we think we can.
You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.
What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.
I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.
Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.
In many ways, writing is the act of saying 'I,' of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, 'Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.' It's an aggressive, even a hostile act.
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.
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.
Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.
I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
Memories are what you no longer want to remember.
Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
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.
You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.
I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.
