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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.

-Joan Didion

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We Tell Ourselves Stories

Joan Didion

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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.

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More From Joan Didion

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

We 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

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.

Time Is The School In Which We Learn.

Time Management

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

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

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

California: The West Coast Of Iowa.

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

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.

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.

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

Any Compulsion Tries To Justify Itself.

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

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

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

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

Magical Thinking

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

It 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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Writers Are Only Rarely Likable.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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'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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

We Write To Discover What We Think.

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

Working Very Hard

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.

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.

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

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

Life Changes In The Instant. The Ordinary Instant.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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

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

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

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

We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

Another Thing I Need To Do, When I'm Near The End Of The Book, Is Sleep In The Same Room With It...somehow The Book Doesn't Leave You When You're Asleep Right Next To It.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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

English Grammar

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

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

Order In The Universe

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

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

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

Memories Are What You No Longer Want To Remember.

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

We 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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Information Is Control.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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."

I've Always Been Fascinated With Marine Geography And How Deep Things Are. I Was Spellbound By The Tsunami, For Example, By The Actual Maps. There Is Just Something About The Unseen Bottom Of The Sea That Has Always Fascinated Me, How Deep Is It.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Anything Worth Having

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.

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

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

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.

...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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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 Not Been The Witness I Wanted To Be.

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

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.

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

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

I Myself Have Always Found That If I Examine Something, It's Less Scary. I Grew Up In The West, And We Always Had This Theory That If You Saw - If You Kept The Snake In Your Eye Line, The Snake Wasn't Going To Bite You. And That's Kind Of The Way I Feel About Confronting Pain. I Want To Know Where It Is.

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

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.

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

We 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Writers Are Always Selling Somebody Out.

We Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Grammar Is A Piano I Play By Ear.

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

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