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As It Happened, I Didn't Grow Up To Be The Kind Of Woman Who Is The Heroine In A Western, And Although The Men I Have Known Have Had Many Virtues And Have Taken Me To Live In Many Places I Have Come To Love, They Have Never Been John Wayne, And They Have Never Taken Me To The Bend In The River Where The Cottonwoods Grow. Deep In That Part Of My Heart Where Artificial Rain Forever Falls, That Is Still The Line I Want To Hear.

-Joan Didion

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As It Happened, I

Joan Didion

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As It Happened, I Didn't Grow Up To Be The Kind Of Woman Who Is The Heroine In A Western, And Although The Men I Have Known Have Had Many Virtues And Have Taken Me To Live In Many Places I Have Come To Love, They Have Never Been John Wayne, And They Have Never Taken Me To The Bend In The River Where The Cottonwoods Grow. Deep In That Part Of My Heart Where Artificial Rain Forever Falls, That Is Still The Line I Want To Hear.

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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 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.

We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live.

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 Have Always Wanted A Swimming Pool And Never Had One.

What You're Normally Doing As A Writer Is Trying To Find The Narrative.

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.

Marriage Is Memory, Marriage Is Time.

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.

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.

Something I've Always Known About The Screen Is That If It's Anything In The World, It's Literal. It's So Literal That There's A Whole Lot You Can't Do Because You're Stuck With The Literalness Of The Screen. The Stage Is Not Literal.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

We Write To Discover What We Think.

For However Dutifully We Record What We See Around Us, The Common Denominator Of All We See Is Always, Transparently, Shamelessly, The Implacable I.

Common Denominator

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

We Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves

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

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

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.

People Tend To Forget That My Presence Runs Counter To Their Best Interests. And It Always Does. That Is One Last Thing To Remember. Writers Are Always Selling Somebody Out.

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."

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.

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

There Was A Level On Which I Believed That What Had Happened Remained Reversible

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

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

I Have Not Been The Witness I Wanted To Be.

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.

I Lead A Very Conventional Life.

Conventional Life

Mourning Has Its Place But Also Its Limits.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Writers Are Always Selling Somebody Out.

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

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

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.

Information Is Control.

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.

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.

Anything Worth Having Has Its Price.

Anything Worth Having

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Anything Worth Having

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.

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.

You Have Your Wonderful Memories," People Said Later, As If Memories Were Solace. Memories Are Not. Memories Are By Definition Of Times Past, Things Gone. Memories Are The Westlake Uniforms In The Closet, The Faded And Cracked Photographs, The Invitations To The Weddings Of The People Who Are No Longer Married, The Mass Cards From The Funerals Of The People Whose Faces You No Longer Remember. Memories Are What You No Longer Want To Remember.

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

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.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Dawned Temperate And Nearly Cloudless In The Eastern United States.

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.

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

Memory Fades, Memory Adjusts, Memory Conforms To What We Think We Remember.

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

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 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.

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

There's A General Impulse To Distract The Grieving Person - As If You Could.

We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live...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. We Live Entirely, Especially If We Are Writers, By The Imposition Of A Narrative Line Upon Disparate Images, By The "ideas" With Which We Have Learned To Freeze The Shifting Phantasmagoria Which Is Our Actual Experience.

Multiple Choice

Making Judgments On Films Is In Many Ways So Peculiarly Vaporous An Occupation That The Only Question Is Why, Beyond The Obvious Opportunities For A Few Lectures Fees And A Little Careerism At A Dispiritingly Self-limiting Level, Anyone Does It In The First Place.

I Don't Lead A Writer's Life. And I Think That Can Be A Source Of Suspicion And Irritation To Some People.

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.

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.

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?

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

It Is Often Said That New York Is A City For Only The Very Rich And The Very Poor. It Is Less Often Said That New York Is Also, At Least For Those Of Us Who Came There From Somewhere Else, A City For Only The Very Young.

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

He Was An Outsider Who Lived By His Ability To Manipulate The Inside.

Was It Only By Dreaming Or Writing That I Could Find Out What I Thought?

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

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

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

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.

You Have To Pick The Places You Don't Walk Away From.

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

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.

My Own Fantasies Of What Life Would Be Like At 24 Tended To The More Spectacular.

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.

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.

It Occurs To Me As I Write That This "white Light," Usually Presented Dippily (evidence Of Afterlife, Higher Power), Is In Fact Precisely Consistent With The Oxygen Deficit That Occurs As Blood Flow To The Brain Decreases. "everything Went White," Those Whose Blood Pressure Has Dropped Say Of The Instant Before They Faint.

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.

...quite Simply, 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 You Never Love Anyone Quite That Way Again. I Remember Walking Across Sixty-second Street One Twilight That First Spring, Or The Second Spring, They Were All Alike For A While. I Was Late To Meet Someone But I Stopped At Lexington Avenue And Bought A Peach And Stood On The Corner Eating It And Knew That I Had Come Out Out Of The West And Reached The Mirage.

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

I Don't Write For Catharsis; I Have To Write To Understand.

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.

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.

On The Whole, I Don't Want To Think Too Much About Why I Write What I Write. If I Know What I'm Doing ... I Can't Do It.

Of Course, You Always Think About How It Will Be Read. I Always Aim For A Reading In One Sitting.

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

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.

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.

There Must Be Times When Everybody Writes When They Feel They're Evading Writing.

I Lost The Conviction That Lights Would Always Turn Green For Me, The Pleasant Certainty That Those Rather Passive Virtues Which Had Won Me Approval As A Child Automatically Guaranteed Me Not Only Phi Beta Kappa Keys But Happiness, Honor, And The Love Of A Good Man; Lost A Certain Touching Faith In The Totem Power Of Good Manners, Clean Hair, And A Proven Competence On The Stanford-binet Scale. To Such Doubtful Amulets Had My Self-respect Been Pinned, And I Faced Myself That Day With The Non-plused Apprehension Of Someone Who Has Come Across A Vampire And Has No Crucifix At Hand.

Let Me Tell You One Thing About Why Writers Write: Had I Known The Answer To Any Of These Questions I Would Never Have Needed To Write A Novel.

I Myself Love To Read Those Victorian Novels Which Go On And On, And You Don't Read Them In One Sitting. You Might Read One Over The Course Of A Summer, But That Isn't What I Want To Write.

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.

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

Working Very Hard

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

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.

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

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.

A Single Person Is Missing For You, And The Whole World Is Empty.

Memories Are What You No Longer Want To Remember.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Need An Hour Alone Before Dinner, With A Drink, To Go Over What I've Done That Day. I Can't Do It Late In The Afternoon Because I'm Too Close To It. Also, The Drink Helps. It Removes Me From The Pages.

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.

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.

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

Order In The Universe

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.

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.

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.

Life Changes In The Instant. The Ordinary Instant.

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.

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

Magical Thinking

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.

Had My Credentials Been In Order I Would Never Have Become A Writer. Had I Been Blessed With Even Limited Access To My Own Mind There Would Have Been No Reason To Write. 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.

I've Come To A Much More Controlled Idea About Death And Loss, But I Don't Think It's Possible To Come To That Much More Controlled Idea Until You've Gone Through The Crazy Part . . . I Don't Mean That I'm Controlled. I Mean That I Gave Up The Idea That I Had Control. That's The New Control.

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

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

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

Any Compulsion Tries To Justify Itself.

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.

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

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.

Some Of Us Who Live In Arid Parts Of The World Think About Water With A Reverence Others Might Find Excessive.

Time Is The School In Which We Learn.

Time Management

Was There Ever In Anyone's Life Span A Point Free In Time, Devoid Of Memory, A Night When Choice Was Any More Than The Sum Of All The Choices Gone Before?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

[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.

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.

I Found Earthquakes, Even When I Was In Them, Deeply Satisfying, Abruptly Revealed Evidence Of The Scheme In Action. That The Schemes Could Destroy The Works Of Man Might Be A Personal Regret But Remained, In The Larger Picture I Had Come To Recognize, A Matter Of Abiding Indifference. No Eye Was On The Sparrow. No Eye Was Watching Me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You Think You Have Some Stable Talent Which 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.

In The Early Years, You Fight Because You Don't Understand Each Other. In The Later Years, You Fight Because You Do.

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.

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.

Once, In A Dry Season, I Wrote In Large Letters Across Two Pages Of A Notebook That Innocence Ends When One Is Stripped Of The Delusion That One Likes Oneself. Although Now, Some Years Later, I Marvel That A Mind On The Outs With Itself Should Have Nonetheless Made Painstaking Record Of Its Every Tremor, I Recall With Embarrassing Clarity The Flavor Of Those Particular Ashes. It Was A Matter Of Misplaced Self-respect.

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

When The Ground Starts Moving, All Bets Are Off.

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!

Vanish. Pass Into Nothingness: The Keats Line That Frightened Her. Fade As The Blue Nights Fade, Go As The Brightness Goes. Go Back Into The Blue. I Myself Placed Her Ashes In The Wall. I Myself Saw The Cathedral Doors Locked At Six. I Know What It Is I Am Now Experiencing. I Know What The Frailty Is, 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. You May See Nothing Still To Be Lost. Yet There Is No Day In Her Life On Which I Do Not See Her.

Grammar Is A Piano I Play By Ear.

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.

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.

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

Actually, When John Died, For The First Time I Thought - For The First Time I Realized How Old I Was, Because I'd Always Thought Of Myself - When John Was Alive I Saw Myself Through His Eyes And He Saw Me As How Old I Was When We Got Married - And So When He Died I Kind Of Looked At Myself In A Different Way. And This Has Kept On Since Then. The Yellow Corvette. When I Gave Up The Yellow Corvette, I Literally Gave Up On It, I Turned It In On A Volvo Station Wagon.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

We Forget All Too Soon The Things We Thought We Could Never Forget. We Forget The Loves And The Betrayals Alike, Forget What We Whispered And What We Screamed, Forget Who We Were.

We Were That Generation Called Silent, But We Were Silent Neither, As Some Thought, Because We Shared The Period's Official Optimism Nor, As Others Thought, Because We Feared Its Official Repression. We Were Silent Because The Exhilaration Of Social Action Seemed To Many Of Us Just One More Way Of Escaping The Personal, Of Masking For A While That Dread Of The Meaningless Which Was Man's Fate.

One Thing In My Defense, Not That It Matters: I Know Something Carter Never Knew, Or Helene, Or Maybe You. I Know What "nothing" Means, And Keep On Playing.

Burroughs's Voice Is Hard, Derisive, Inventive, Free, Funny, Serious, Poetic, Indelibly American.

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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