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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.

-Joan Didion

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When I Began Writing

Joan Didion

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Magical Thinking

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

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

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

I Lead A Very Conventional Life.

Conventional Life

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 Write To Discover What We Think.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Anything Worth Having Has Its Price.

Anything Worth Having

Grammar Is A Piano I Play By Ear.

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.

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.

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

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

Writers Are Only Rarely Likable.

When The Ground Starts Moving, All Bets Are Off.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live.

Any Compulsion Tries To Justify Itself.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

...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.

Hand That On Parting Squeezes Your Shoulder, Salutes The Small Of Your Back.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

To Cure Jealousy Is To See It For What It Is, A Dissatisfaction With Self.

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

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

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

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

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

Time Is The School In Which We Learn.

Time Management

Mourning Has Its Place But Also Its Limits.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Anything Worth Having

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.

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.

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?

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

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

I'm Totally In Control Of This Tiny, Tiny World Right There At The Typewriter.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Working Very Hard

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 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.

The Fear Is For What Is Still To Be Lost.

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.

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

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

We Forget All Too Soon The Things We Thought We Could Never Forget.

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

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.

To Shift The Structure Of A Sentence Alters The Meaning Of That Sentence, As Definitely And Inflexibly As The Position Of A Camera Alters The Meaning Of The Object Photographed.

Life Changes In The Instant. The Ordinary Instant.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Information Is Control.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

Marriage Is Memory, Marriage Is Time.

We All Survive More Than We Think We Can.

Although I Have Felt Compelled To Write Things Down Since I Was Five Years Old, I Doubt That My Daughter Ever Will, For She Is A Singularly Blessed And Accepting Child, Delighted With Life Exactly As Life Presents Itself To Her, Unafraid To Go To Sleep And Unafraid To Wake Up. 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 ... Have Another Cup Of Coffee With My Mother. We Get Along Very Well, Veterans Of A Guerrilla War We Never Understood.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

English Grammar

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."

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.

We Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We All Have The Same Dreams.

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.

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.

I Was Supposed To Have A Script, And Had Mislaid It. I Was Supposed To Hear Cues, And No Longer Did. I Was Meant To Know The Plot, But All I Knew Was What I Saw: Flash Pictures In Variable Sequence, Images With No 'meaning' Beyond Their Temporary Arrangement, Not A Movie But A Cutting-room Experience.

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

I Have Not Been The Witness I Wanted To Be.

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

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

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