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Above All, She Is The Girl Who 'feels' Things, Who Has Hung On To The Freshness And Pain Of Adolescence, The Girl Ever Wounded, Ever Young. Now, At An Age When The Wounds Begin To Heal Whether One Wants Them To Or Not, Joan Baez Rarely Leaves The Carmel Valley.

-Joan Didion

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Above All, She Is

Joan Didion

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Above All, She Is The Girl Who 'feels' Things, Who Has Hung On To The Freshness And Pain Of Adolescence, The Girl Ever Wounded, Ever Young. Now, At An Age When The Wounds Begin To Heal Whether One Wants Them To Or Not, Joan Baez Rarely Leaves The Carmel Valley.

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It Was Once Suggested To Me That, As An Antidote To Crying, I Put My Head In A Paper Bag.

It's Just A Deep Pleasure To Read Something You've Written Yourself - If And When You Like It.

It Is Easy To See The Beginnings Of Things, And Harder To See The Ends.

I Always Want Everything Read In One Sitting. If They Can't Read It In One Sitting, You're Going To Lose The Rhythm Of It. You're Going To Lose The Shape Of It.

This Book Is Called "blue Nights" Because At The Time I Began It I Found My Mind Turning Increasingly To Illness, To The End Of Promise, The Dwindling Of The Days,the Inevitability Of The Fading, The Dying Of The Brightness. Blue Nights Are The Opposite Of The Dying Of The Brightness, But They Are Also Its Warning.

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.

Memories Are What You No Longer Want To Remember.

I Was Relying On A Kind Of Natural Transition - The Transitions Made By Someone Who Is Slightly Deranged.

I Could Talk More Directly In A Nonfiction Voice Than I Could In Fiction.

Let Me Just Be In The Ground. Let Me Just Be In The Ground And Go To Sleep.

The Secret Point Of Money And Power In America Is Neither The Things That Money Can Buy Nor Power For Power's Sake But Absolute Personal Freedom, Mobility, Privacy.

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.

[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.

To Have That Sense Of One's Intrinsic Worth Which Constitutes Self-respect Is Potentially To Have Everything: The Ability To Discriminate, To Love And To Remain Indifferent. To Lack It Is To Be Locked Within Oneself, Paradoxically Incapable Of Either Love Or Indifference.

Grief, When It Comes, Is Nothing We Expect It To Be. Grief Has No Distance. Grief Comes In Waves, Paroxysms, Sudden Apprehensions That Weaken The Knees And Blind The Eyes And Obliterate The Dailiness Of Life.

When I Began Writing These Pages I Believed Their Subject To Be Children, The Ones We Have And The Ones We Wish We Had, The Ways In Which We Depend On Our Children To Depend On Us, The Ways In Which We Encourage Them To Remain Children, The Ways In Which They Remain More Unknown To Us Than They Do To Their More Casual Acquaintances; The Ways In Which We Remain Equally Opaque To Them.

I Have Already Lost Touch With A Couple Of People I Used To Be

I Never Actually Learned The Rules Of Grammar, Relying Instead Only On What Sounded Right.

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.

California Is A Place In Which A Boom Mentality And A Sense Of Chekhovian Loss Meet In Uneasy Suspension.

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. After A While I Arrive At An Accommodation: Well, It's Not The Ideal, It's Not The Perfect Object I Wanted To Make, But Maybeif I Go Ahead And Finish It Anywayi Can Get It Right Next Time. Maybe I Can Have Another Chance.

The Fancy That Extraterrestrial Life Is By Definition Of A Higher Order Than Our Own Is One That Soothes All Children, And Many Writers.

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.

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.

Everybody Who Undergoes A Death And Finds Themselves Grieving Is Obsessed With — Or Maybe Overly Focused On — The Idea That They Can’t Display Self-pity, They Have To Be Strong. Actually There Are A Lot Of Reasons Why You Are Going To Feel Sorry For Yourself, But That’s Your First Concern.

California Is A Place In Which A Boom Mentality And A Sense Of Chekhovian Loss Meet In Uneasy Suspension; In Which The Mind Is Troubled By Some Buried But Ineradicable Suspicion That Things Better Work Here, Because Here, Beneath The Immense Bleached Sky,is Where We Run Out Of Continent.

Details Are Our Business As Writers. Your Heart Leaps When You See A Detail That Can Go Somewhere

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.

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.

Information Is Control.

Only The Dying Man Can Tell How Much Time He Has Left.

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.

That Was The Year, My Twenty-eighth, When I Was Discovering That Not All Of The Promises Would Be Kept, That Some Things Are In Fact Irrevocable And That It Had Counted After All, Every Evasion And Every Procrastination, Every Mistake, Every Word, All Of It.

Procrastination

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.

Many People I Know In Los Angeles Believe That The Sixties Ended Abruptly On August 9, 1969, Ended At The Exact Moment When Word Of The Murders On Cielo Drive Traveled Like Brushfire Through The Community, And In A Sense This Is True. The Tension Broke That Day. The Paranoia Was Fulfilled.

We Live Entirely, Especially If We Are Writers, By The Imposition Of A Narrative Line Upon Disparate Images.

Had I Been Blessed With Even Limited Access To My Own Mind There Would Have Been No Reason To Write.

People With Self-respect Exhibit A Certain Toughness, A Kind Of Moral Nerve; They Display What Was Once Called *character,* A Quality Which, Although Approved In The Abstract, Sometimes Loses Ground To The Other, More Instantly Negotiable Virtues.... Character--the Willingness To Accept Responsibility For One's Own Life--is The Source From Which Self-respect Springs.

Vegas Is The Most Extreme And Allegorical Of American Settlements, Bizarre And Beautiful In Its Venality And In Its Devotion To Immediate Gratification.

You Aren't Sure If You're Making The Right Decision - About Anything, Ever.

Writers Are Always Selling Somebody Out.

It Was The United States Of America In The Cold Late Spring Of 1967, And The Market Was Steady And The G.n.p. High And A Great Many Articulate People Seemed To Have A Sense Of High Social Purpose And It Might Have Been A Spring Of Brave Hopes And National Promise, But It Was Not, And More And More People Had The Uneasy Apprehension That It Was Not.

When You're Writing Fiction, You Don't Have Notes Necessarily. You Don't Carve It, It's Not Like A Piece Of Sculpture, It's More Like Water Color.

We Imagined We Knew Everything The Other Thought, Even When We Did Not Necessarily Want To Know It, But In Fact, I Have Come To See, We Knew Not The Smallest Fraction Of What There Was To Know.

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.

To Free Us From The Expectations Of Others, To Give Us Back To Ourselves - There Lies The Great, Singular Power Of Self-respect.

I Can't Imagine Writing If I Didn't Have A Reader. Any More Than An Actor Can Imagine Acting Without An Audience.

Life Changes Fast. Life Changes In The Instant. You Sit Down To Dinner And Life As You Know It Ends.

I Know Why We Try To Keep The Dead Alive: We Try To Keep Them Alive In Order To Keep Them With Us. I Also Know That If We Are To Live Ourselves There Comes A Point At Which We Must Relinquish The Dead, Let Them Go, Keep Them Dead.

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.

The Wind Shows Us How Close To The Edge We Are.

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.

Do Not Whine... Do Not Complain. Work Harder. Spend More Time Alone.

Despite Our Preparation, Indeed, Despite Our Age, [the Death Of A Parent] Dislodges Things Deep In Us, Sets Off Reactions That Surprise Us And May Cut Free Memories And Feelings That We Thought Had Gone To Ground Long Ago. We Might, In That Indeterminate Period They Call Mourning, Be In A Submarine, Silent On The Ocean's Bed, Aware Of The Depth Charges, Now Near And Now Far, Buffeting Us With Recollections.

I Read So Ravenously That I Would Read Through Whole Categories. I Was Crazy About Reading Biographies. [...] I Think Biographies Are Very Urgent To Children.

There's A Lot Of Landscape I Never Would Have Described If I Hadn't Been Homesick. The Impulse Was Nostalgia.

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.

The Future Always Looks Good In The Golden Land, Because No One Remembers The Past ... Here Is The Last Stop For All Those Who Come From Somewhere Else, For All Those Who Drifted Away From The Cold And The Past And The Old Ways.

Ask Anyone Committed To Marxist Analysis How Many Angels 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.

To Cure Jealousy Is To See It For What It Is, A Dissatisfaction With Self, An Impossible Claim That One Should Be At Once Rose Bowl Princess, Medieval Scholar, Saint Joan, Milly Theale, Temple Drake, Eleanor Of Aquitaine, One

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.

Before I'd Written Movies, I Never Could Do Big Set-piece Scenes With A Lot Of Different Speakers - When You've Got Twelve People Around A Dinner Table Talking At Cross Purposes. I Had Always Been Impressed By Other People's Ability To Do That.

The Minute You Start Putting Words On Paper You're Eliminating Possibilities.

Writing Is Always A Way, For Me, Of Coming To Some Sort Of Understanding That I Can't Reach Otherwise.it Forces You To Think. It Forces You To Work The Thing Through. Nothing Comes To Us Out Of The Blue, Very Easily.

The Apparent Ease Of California Life Is An Illusion, And Those Who Believe The Illusion Will Live Here In Only The Most Temporary Way.

The Past Could Be Jettisoned . . . But Seeds Got Carried.

I Hadn't Thought That I Was Generally A Pack Rat, But It Turns Out I Am.

I Just Read Everything I Could Get My Hands On. I Taught Myself To Read Or My Mother Taught Me. Who Knows How I Learned To Read? It Was Before I Went To School, So I Would Go To The Library And Just Take Things Off The Shelf. My Mother Had To Sign A Piece Of Paper Saying I Could Take Adult Books.

Why Do You Always Have To Be Right. Why Do You Always Have To Have The Last Word. For Once In Your Life Just Let It Go.

We All Survive More Than We Think We Can.

Life Changes In The Instant. The Ordinary Instant.

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 Know Why We Try To Keep The Dead Alive: We Try To Keep Them Alive In Order To Keep Them With Us.

Prepare A Little Hot Tea Or Broth And It Should Be Brought To Them . . . Without Their Being Asked If They Would Care For It. Those Who Are In Great Distress Want No Food, But If It Is Handed To Them, They Will Mechanically Take It ' ... There Was Something Arresting About The Matter-of-fact Wisdom Here, The Instinctive Understanding Of The Physiological Disruptions... I Will Not Forget The Instinctive Wisdom Of The Friend Who, Every Day For Those First Few Weeks, Brought Me A Quart Container Of Scallion-and-ginger Congee From Chinatown. Congee I Could Eat. Congee Was All I Could Eat.

The Fear Is For What Is Still To Be Lost.

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 You Lose Someone, A Whole Lot Of Perfectly Normal Circumstances Suddenly Take On Different Meaning. You See It In A Different Light. You Wonder If They Knew. I Wondered. Doctors Have Told Me That People Do Have A Sense Of Their Own Approaching Death.

Perfectly Normal

Novels Are Almost Like Music Or Poetry - They Just Come To Me In Simple Sentences, Whereas I Think My Pieces Get More And More Complex Ever Since I've Started Using A Computer.

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.

If You Aren't Aware Of The Reader, You're Working In A Vacuum.

We Are Well Advised To Keep On Nodding Terms With The People We Used To Be, Whether We Find Them Attractive Company Or Not.

I Have An Investment In Not Being Crazy. I Have A Real Investment In Seeing Things Straight. This Runs Counter To That Investment, So It Required Giving Up An Idea Of Myself, The Idea Being That I Had Control.

I Did Consider Marriage And Motherhood Extreme And Doomed Commitments. Not Out Of Any Experience Of Them As Such, But It Was Simply The Way I Looked At Things.

New York Was No Mere City. It Was Instead An Infinitely Romantic Notion.

Throw Yourself Into The Convulsions Of The World. I'm Not Telling You To Make The World Better, Because I Don't Believe Progress Is Necessarily Part Of The Package. I'm Just Telling You To Live In It, To Look At It, To Witness It. Try And Get It. Seize The Moment.

To Assign Unanswered Letters Their Proper Weight, To Free Us From The Expectations Of Others, To Give Us Back To Ourselves--there Lies The Great, The Singular Power Of Self-respect. Without It, One Eventually Discovers The Final Turn Of The Screw: One Runs Away To Find Oneself, And Finds No One At Home.

I Am A Writer. Imagining What Someone Would Say Or Do Comes To Me As Naturally As Breathing.

It Occurs To Me That We Allow Ourselves To Imagine Only Such Messages As We Need To Survive.

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.

The Genuflection Toward 'fairness' Is A Familiar Newsroom Piety, In Practice The Excuse For A Good Deal Of Autopilot Reporting And Lazy Thinking But In Theory A Benign Ideal. In Washington, However, A Community In Which The Management Of News Has Become The Single Overriding Preoccupation Of The Core Industry, What 'fairness' Has Often Come To Mean Is A Scrupulous Passivity, An Agreement To Cover The Story Not As It Is Occurring But As It Is Presented, Which Is To Say As It Is Manufactured.

The Future Always Looks Good In The Golden Land, Because No One Remembers The Past.

When The Ground Starts Moving, All Bets Are Off.

Lancaster, California ... That Promised Land Sometimes Called 'the West Coast Of Iowa.

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.

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.

My First Notebook Was A Big Five Tablet, Given To Me [at Age Five] By My Mother With The Sensible Suggestion That I Stop Whining And Learn To Amuse Myself By Writing Down My Thoughts.

Water Is Important To People Who Do Not Have It, And The Same Is True Of Control.

What I Want To Tell You Today Is Not To Move Into That World Where You're Alone With Yourself And Your Mantra And Your Fitness Program Or Whatever It Is That You Might Use To Try To Control The World By Closing It Out. I Want To Tell You Just To Live In The Mess. Throw Yourself Out Into The Convulsions Of The World. I'm Not Telling You To Make The World Better, Because I Don't Believe Progress Is Necessarily Part Of The Package. I'm Telling You To Live In It. Try And Get It. Take Chances, Make Your Own Work, Take Pride In It. Seize The Moment.

Discovery Still Happens In The Writing. You Start In Nonfiction With A Whole Lot More Going For You, Because All The Discovery Isn't Waiting To Be Made. You've Made Some Of It In The Research. As You Get Deeper Into A Piece And Do More Research, The Notes Are In The Direction Of The Piece - You're Actually Writing It.

Marriage Is Memory, Marriage Is Time. Marriage Is Not Only Time: It Is Also, Parodoxically, The Denial Of Time.

Aging And Its Evidence Remain Lifes Most Predictable Events, Yet They Also Remain Matters We Prefer To Leave Unmentioned, Unexplored.

Most Death Now Happens In Hospitals. It's Been Medicalized. It Happens Away From Where We Deal With It Directly. And That's A Huge Change. At The Beginning Of The 20th Century Most People Died At Home. Death Was Much More Common.

Innocence Ends When One Is Stripped Of The Delusion That One Likes Oneself.

I Work Every Day. Sometimes I Don't Accomplish Anything Every Day, But If I Don't Work Every Day, I Get Depressed And Get Afraid To Start Again. So I Do Something Every Day.

In The Absence Of A Natural Disaster We Are Left Again To Our Own Uneasy Devices.

I Never Had Much Interest In Being A Child. As A Way Of Being It Seemed Flat, Failed To Engage.

Right There Is The Usefulness Of Migraine, There In That Imposed Yoga, The Concentration On The Pain. For When The Pain Recedes, Ten Or Twelve Hours Later, Everything Goes With It, All The Hidden Resentments, All The Vain Anxieties. The Migraine Has Acted As A Circuit Breaker, And The Fuses Have Emerged Intact. There Is A Pleasant Convalescent Euphoria.

Grief Turns Out To Be A Place None Of Us Know Until We Reach It.

Magical Thinking

I Was In Love With New York. I Do Not Mean 'love' In Any Colloquial Way, I Mean That I Was In Love With The City, The Way You Love The First Person Who Ever Touches You And Never Love Anyone Quite That Way Again.

Nonfiction Is More Personal For Me. It's More Personal In That It's More Direct, And Actually It's Always Been More Direct, Even When I First Started Doing Pieces.

It's Hard To Find A Book That's Safe To Write. Because One Always Goes To Dark Or Difficult Places.

When I Am Near The End Of A Book, I Have To Sleep In The Same Room With It.

California: The West Coast Of Iowa.

Grief, When It Comes, Is Nothing Like We Expect It To Be.

Most Of Our Platitudes Notwithstanding, Self-deception Remains The Most Difficult Deception. The Tricks That Work On Others Count For Nothing In That Very Well-lit Back Alley Where One Keeps Assignation With Oneself: No Winning Smiles Will Do Here, No Prettily Drawn Lists Of Good Intentions. One Shuffles Flashily But In Vain Through One's Marked Cards- The Kindness Done For The Wrong Reason, The Apparent Triumph Which Involved No Real Effort, The Seemingly Heroic Act Into Which One Had Been Shamed.

There's A Point When You Go With What You've Got. Or You Don't Go.

I Came Into Adult Life Equipped With An Essentially Romantic Ethic.

In Fact I No Longer Value This Kind Of Memento. I No Longer Want Reminders Of What Was, What Got Broken, What Got Lost, What Got Wasted. There Was A Period, A Long Period, Dating From My Childhood Until Quite Recently, When I Thought I Did. A Period During Which I Believed That I Could Keep People Fully Present, Keep Them With Me, By Preserving Their Mementos, Their "things," Their Totems.

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.

The Writer Is Always Tricking The Reader Into Listening To Their Dream.

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.

Multiple Choice

Outside, A Ceiling Of Pearly Gray Clouds Coalesced Over Manhattan, And The Apartment Had Grown Dark. It Just Keeps Dripping. It's Been Like This All Week, .. Rain Would Be A Relief.

The Willingness To Accept Responsibility For One's Own Life Is The Source From Which Self-respect Springs.

You Have To Make Sure You Have The Characters You Want. That's Really The Most Complicated Part.

Americans Are Uneasy With Their Possessions, Guilty About Power, All Of Which Is Difficult For Europeans To Perceive Because They Are Themselves So Truly Materialistic, So Versed In The Uses Of Power.

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.

To Have That Sense Of One's Intrinsic Worth Which Constitutes Self-respect Is Potentially To Have Everything.

To Believe In'the Greater Good' Isto Operate, Necessarily, In A Certain Ethical Suspension.

Somehow Writing Has Always Seemed To Me To Have An Element Of Performance.

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.

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.

We Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves

But The Fact Of It Was That I Liked It Out There, A Ruin Devoid Of Human Vanities, Clean Of Human Illusions, An Empty Place Reclaimed By The Weather Where A Woman Plays An Organ To Stop The Wind's Whining And An Old Man Plays Ball With A Dog Named Duke. I Could Tell You That I Came Back Because I Had Promises To Keep, But Maybe It Was Because Nobody Asked Me To Stay.

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.

It Is Impossible To Think Of Howard Hughes Without Seeing The Apparently Bottomless Gulf Between What We Say We Want And What We Do Want, Between What We Officially Admire And Secretly Desire, Between, In The Largest Sense, The People We Marry And The People We Love. In A Nation Which Increasingly Appears To Prize Social Virtues, Howard Hughes Remains Not Merely Antisocial But Grandly, Brilliantly, Surpassingly, Asocial. He Is The Last Private Man, The Dream We No Longer Admit.

If You Want To Understand What You're Thinking, You Kind Of Have To Work It Through And Write It. And The Only Way To Work It Through, For Me, Is To Write It.

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 Think Of 'living' There Was To Reduce The Miraculous To The Mundane; One Does Not 'live' At Xanadu.

Anything Worth Having Has Its Price.

Anything Worth Having

The Ability To Think For One's Self Depends Upon One's Mastery Of The Language.

We Are Repeatedly Left, In Other Words, With No Further Focus Than Ourselves, A Source From Which Self-pity Naturally Flows. Each Time This Happens I Am Struck Again By The Permanent Impassibility Of The Divide. Some People Who Have Lost A Husband Or A Wife Report Feeling That Person's Presence, Receiving That Person's Advice. Some Report Actual Sightings, What Freud Described In "mourning And Melancholia" As "a Clinging To The Object Through The Medium Of A Hallucinatory Wishful Psychosis." Others Describe Not A Visible Apparition But Just A "very Strongly Felt Presence."

We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live. We Live Entirely By The Impression Of A Narrative Line Upon Disparate Images, The Shifting Phantasmagoria, Which Is Our Actual Experience.

I Know What "nothing" Means, And Keep On Playing.

My Writing Is A Process Of Rewriting, Of Going Back And Changing And Filling In. In The Rewriting Process You Discover What's Going On, And You Go Back And Bring It Up To That Point.

A Pool Is, For Many Of Us In The West, A Symbol Not Of Affluence But Of Order, Of Control Over The Uncontrollable. A Pool Is Water, Made Available And Useful, And Is, As Such, Infinitely Soothing To The Western Eye.

The Last Sentence In A Piece Is Another Adventure. It Should Open The Piece Up.

Late Afternoon On The West Coast Ends With The Sky Doing All Its Brilliant Stuff.

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.

It Is Hard For People Who Have Not Lived In Los Angeles To Realize How Radically The Santa Ana Figures In The Local Imagination. ... The Wind Shows Us How Close To The Edge We Are.

I ... Have Another Cup Of Coffee With My Mother. We Get Along Very Well, Veterans Of A Guerrilla War We Never Understood.

What Makes Iago Evil? Some People Ask. I Never Ask.

I Recall An August Afternoon In Chicago In 1973 When I Took My Daughter, Then Seven, To See What Georgia O’keeffe Had Done With Where She Had Been. One Of The Vast O’keeffe ‘sky Above Clouds’ Canvases Floated Over The Back Stairs In The Chicago Art Institute That Day, Dominating What Seemed To Be Several Stories Of Empty Light, And My Daughter Looked At It Once, Ran To The Landing, And Kept On Looking. "who Drew It," She Whispered After A While. I Told Her. "i Need To Talk To Her," She Said Finally.

If You Are Doing A Piece About Somebody, Even If You Admire Them Tremendously And Express That In The Piece, Express That Admiration, If They're Not Used To Being Written About, If They're Civilians, [...] They're Not Used To Seeing Themselves Through Other People's Eyes. So You Will Always See Them From A Slightly Different Angle Than They See Themselves, And They Feel A Little Betrayed By That.

Yes, But Another Writer I Read In High School Who Just Knocked Me Out Was Theodore Dreiser. I Read An American Tragedy All In One Weekend And Couldn't Put It Down - I Locked Myself In My Room. Now That Was Antithetical To Every Other Book I Was Reading At The Time Because Dreiser Really Had No Style, But It Was Powerful.

Short Stories Demand A Certain Awareness Of One's Own Intentions, A Certain Narrowing Of The Focus.

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.

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.

I Mean Maybe I Was Holding All The Aces, But What Was The Game?

When I'm Working On A Book, I Constantly Retype My Own Sentences. Every Day I Go Back To Page One And Just Retype What I Have. It Gets Me Into A Rhythm.

We Write To Discover What We Think.

Read, Learn, Work It Up, Go To The Literature. Information Is Control.

New York Is Full Of People . . . With A Feeling For The Tangential Adventure, The Risky Adventure, The Interlude That's Not Likely To End In Any Double-ring Ceremony.

And I Have Learned Now To Live With It, Learned When To Expect It, How To Outwit It, Even How To Regard It, When It Does Come, As More Friend Than Lodger. We Have Reached A Certain Understanding, My Migraine And I.

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.

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.

I Do Have A Strong Sense Of An Order In The Universe.

Order In The Universe

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.

The Impulse To Write Things Down Is A Peculiarly Compulsive One, Inexplicable To Those Who Do Not Share It

I Don't Have A Very Clear Idea Of Who The Characters Are Until They Start Talking.

The Secret Point Of Money And Power In America Is Neither The Things That Money Can Buy Nor Power For Power's Sake... But Absolute Personal Freedom, Mobility, Privacy. It Is The Instinct Which Drove America To The Pacific, All Through The Nineteenth Century, The Desire To Be Able To Find A Restaurant Open In Case You Want A Sandwich, To Be A Free Agent, Live By One's Own Rules.

I Was Four Or Five, And My Mother Gave Me A Big Black Tablet, Because I Kept Complaining That I Was Bored. She Said, "then Write Something. Then You Can Read It." In Fact, I Had Just Learned To Read, So This Was A Thrilling Kind Of Moment. The Idea That I Could Write Something - And Then Read It!

Going Back To California Is Not Like Going Back To Vermont, Or Chicago; Vermont And Chicago Are Relative Constants, Against Which One Measures One's Own Change. All That Is Constant About The California Of My Childhood Is The Rate At Which It Disappears.

I Have Always Wanted A Swimming Pool And Never Had One.

Once I Get Over Maybe A Hundred Pages, I Won't Go Back To Page One, But I Might Go Back To Page Fifty-five, Or Twenty, Even. But Then Every Once In A While I Feel The Need To Go To Page One Again And Start Rewriting.

Becoming A Parent Is Actually Terrifying. A Lot Of People Have That Feeling About Their Dogs. And If You're The Kind Of Person Who's Going To Have That Feeling About A Dog You're Definitely Going To Have That About A Child.

I Was No Longer, If I Had Ever Been, Afraid To Die: I Was Now Afraid Not To Die.

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.

Self-respect Is A Question Of Recognizing That Anything Worth Having Has A Price.

Anything Worth Having

I Closed The Box And Put It In A Closet. There Is No Real Way To Deal With Everything We Lose.

We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live.

Nothing I Read About Grief Seemed To Exactly Express The Craziness Of It; Which Was The Interesting Aspect Of It To Me - How Really Tenuous Our Sanity Is.

Once In A While There Were Things In Screenwriting That Taught Me Things For Fiction. But There's Nothing In Screenwriting That Teaches You Anything For The Theater. I'm Not Sure I've Ever Fully Appreciated Before How Different A Form Theater Is.

Writing Nonfiction Is More Like Sculpture, A Matter Of Shaping The Research Into The Finished Thing.

Time Is The School In Which We Learn.

Time Management

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.

Of Course Great Hotels Have Always Been Social Ideas, Flawless Mirrors To The Particular Societies They Service.

If We Do Not Respect Ourselves, We Are On The One Hand Forced To Despise Those Who Have So Few Resources As To Consort With Us, So Little Perception As To Remain Blind To Our Fatal Weaknesses. On The Other, We Are Peculiarly In Thrall To Everyone We See, Curiously Determined To Live Out — Since Our Self-image Is Untenable — Their False Notions Of Us… We Play Roles Doomed To Failure Before They Are Begun, Each Defeat Generating Fresh Despair At The Urgency Of Divining And Meeting The Next Demand Made Upon Us.

That No One Dies Of Migraine Seems, To Someone Deep Into An Attack, An Ambiguous Blessing.

I Think Nobody Owns The Land Until Their Dead Are In It.

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.

We Were Not Having Any Fun, He Had Recently Begun Pointing Out. I Would Take Exception (didn't We Do This, Didn't We Do That) But I Had Also Known What He Meant. He Meant Doing Things Not Because We Were Expected To Do Them Or Had Always Done Them Or Should Do Them But Because We Wanted To Do Them. He Meant Wanting. He Meant Living.

I Don't Know What I Think Until I Write It Down.

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.

Grammar Is A Piano I Play By Ear. All I Know About Grammar Is Its Power.

English Grammar

Marriage Is Memory, Marriage Is Time.

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.

We Are Imperfect Mortal Beings, Aware Of That Mortality Even As We Push It Away, Failed By Our Very Complication, So Wired That When We Mourn Our Losses We Also Mourn, For Better Or For Worse, Ourselves. As We Were. As We Are No Longer. As We Will One Day Not Be At All.

Writers Are Only Rarely Likable.

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?

Everything Goes. I Am Working Very Hard At Not Thinking About How Everything Goes.

Working Very Hard

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