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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.

-Joan Didion

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If We Do Not

Joan Didion

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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.

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Procrastination

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

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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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 Didn’t Like It [computer] When I First Began Using It. Where It’s Helped Me A Lot Is In Nonfiction Which Is A Kind Of Different Process. You’ve Got Research, You’ve Got Your Notes, You Can Block Out What You Want To Work On For The Next 10 Pages And Put It In Another File, And Then You Can Kind Of Carve It Into Shape

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.

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

Memories Are What You No Longer Want To Remember.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Anything Worth Having

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I Have Not Been The Witness I Wanted To Be.

Writers Are Only Rarely Likable.

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

Magical Thinking

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Mourning Has Its Place But Also Its Limits.

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.

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'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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Order In The Universe

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Information Is Control.

...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.

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

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

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

I Lead A Very Conventional Life.

Conventional Life

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

Anything Worth Having Has Its Price.

Anything Worth Having

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

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

We All Have The Same Dreams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

We All Survive More Than We Think We Can.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

English Grammar

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.

We Write To Discover What We Think.

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.

The Fear Is For What Is Still To Be Lost.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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 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.

[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.

Writers Are Always Selling Somebody Out.

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.

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.

Any Compulsion Tries To Justify Itself.

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.

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.

Grammar Is A Piano I Play By Ear.

Life Changes In The Instant. The Ordinary Instant.

We Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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