Joan Didion: California: The west coast of Iowa.

What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?

Joan Didion

light blue night

Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.

Joan Didion

block knowing writing

I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.

Joan Didion

unseen marine sea

The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can "drive" on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participation requires total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.

Joan Didion

mind people thinking

Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't.

Joan Didion

twelve reading simple

I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.

Joan Didion

parent people thinking

I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.

Joan Didion

knows mean

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.

Joan Didion

texture painting novel

I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.

Joan Didion

irritation people thinking

It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.

Joan Didion

bags cry paper

One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense.

Joan Didion

crazy grief thinking

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.

Joan Didion

vegas gambling morning

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

Joan Didion

thin-air narrative lines

You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.

Joan Didion

complicated want character

Aging and its evidence remain lifes most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

Joan Didion

aging events matter

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.

Joan Didion

rereading victory mean

I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.

Joan Didion

swimming-pool pool swimming

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.

Joan Didion

september-11 united-states tuesday

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

Joan Didion

appreciated moments facts

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become.

Joan Didion

who-i-am writing children