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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?

-Joan Didion

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What Does It Cost

Joan Didion

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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?

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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.

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

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

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.

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

Writers Are Always Selling Somebody Out.

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

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

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.

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

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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We All Survive More Than We Think We Can.

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

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

Memories Are What You No Longer Want To Remember.

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.

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.

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.

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

Life Changes In The Instant. The Ordinary Instant.

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

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

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

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

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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.

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?

We Are Repeatedly Left, In Other Words, With No Further Focus Than Ourselves, A Source From Which Self-pity Naturally Flows. Each Time This Happens I Am Struck Again By The Permanent Impassibility Of The Divide. Some People Who Have Lost A Husband Or A Wife Report Feeling That Person's Presence, Receiving That Person's Advice. Some Report Actual Sightings, What Freud Described In "mourning And Melancholia" As "a Clinging To The Object Through The Medium Of A Hallucinatory Wishful Psychosis." Others Describe Not A Visible Apparition But Just A "very Strongly Felt Presence."

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

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.

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

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.

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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.

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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.

We All Have The Same Dreams.

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.

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

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

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Mourning Has Its Place But Also Its Limits.

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

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

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.

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

There Is Always A Point In The Writing Of A Piece When I Sit In A Room Literally Papered With False Starts And Cannot Put One Word After Another And Imagine That I Have Suffered A Small Stroke, Leaving Me Apparently Undamaged But Actually Aphasic.

We 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

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

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.

I Have Not Been The Witness I Wanted To Be.

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

Yes, But Another Writer I Read In High School Who Just Knocked Me Out Was Theodore Dreiser. I Read An American Tragedy All In One Weekend And Couldn't Put It Down - I Locked Myself In My Room. Now That Was Antithetical To Every Other Book I Was Reading At The Time Because Dreiser Really Had No Style, But It Was Powerful.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Lead A Very Conventional Life.

Conventional Life

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

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.

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

English Grammar

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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

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'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.

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

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

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.

California: The West Coast Of Iowa.

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.

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

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

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

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

Keepers Of Private Notebooks Are A Different Breed Altogether, Lonely And Resistant Rearrangers Of Things, Anxious Malcontents, Children Afflicted Apparently At Birth With Some Presentiment Of Loss.

I 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Working Very Hard

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

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.

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 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 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.

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

Anything Worth Having

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

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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

Grammar Is A Piano I Play By Ear.

We Write To Discover What We Think.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves

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.

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

Any Compulsion Tries To Justify Itself.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Order In The Universe

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

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.

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 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.

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 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.

Anything Worth Having Has Its Price.

Anything Worth Having

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

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.

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.

We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live.

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

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?

...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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

Magical Thinking

Writers Are Only Rarely Likable.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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