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

-Joan Didion

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Tuesday, September 11, 2001,

Joan Didion

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

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

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

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.

We All Have The Same Dreams.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

We All Survive More Than We Think We Can.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

We Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves

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

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.

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

Working Very Hard

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.

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

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.

On The August Night In 1933 When General Gerardo Machado, Then President Of Cuba, Flew Out Of Havana Into Exile, He Took With Him Five Revolvers, Seven Bags Of Gold, And Five Friends, Still In Their Pajamas.

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

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

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

I 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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

English Grammar

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I 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.

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.

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

Writers Are Only Rarely Likable.

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.

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

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

We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live.

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

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

California: The West Coast Of Iowa.

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

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.

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

Any Compulsion Tries To Justify Itself.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

Grammar Is A Piano I Play By Ear.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Marriage Is Memory, Marriage Is Time.

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.

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.

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 Came Into Adult Life Equipped With An Essentially Romantic Ethic.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

[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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 Lead A Very Conventional Life.

Conventional Life

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

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.

Information Is Control.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

Writers Are Always Selling Somebody Out.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Anything Worth Having

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

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

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.

We Write To Discover What We Think.

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

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

Memories Are What You No Longer Want To Remember.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Anything Worth Having Has Its Price.

Anything Worth Having

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.

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

Magical Thinking

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.

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."

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

Mourning Has Its Place But Also Its Limits.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The Fear Is For What Is Still To Be Lost.

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

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

Order In The Universe

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.

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.

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.

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

Sometimes An Actor Performs A Character, But Sometimes An Actor Just Performs. With Writing, I Don't Think It's Performing A Character, Really, If The Character You're Performing Is Yourself. I Don't See That As Playing A Role. It's Just Appearing In Public.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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