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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."
-Joan Didion
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Writing Is The Act

Joan Didion
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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."

Understanding the Quote: "writing is the act of saying "i," of imposing oneself upon other..."

This quote by Joan Didion reflects deeply on the theme of writing. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Writing, People, Mind, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Joan Didion interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Joan Didion

Joan Didion is celebrated for insightful thoughts on writing and people. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Writing
People
Mind
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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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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.
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Memory Fades, Memory Adjusts, Memory Conforms To What We Think We Remember.
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Grief, When It Comes, Is Nothing Like We Expect It To Be.
Grief
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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.
Life
Believe
Progress
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.
Past
Land
Somewhere Else
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.
Running
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[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.
Blessing
Twenties
Three
Late Afternoon On The West Coast Ends With The Sky Doing All Its Brilliant Stuff.
Sky
West Coast
Afternoon
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.
Order
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I Never Actually Learned The Rules Of Grammar, Relying Instead Only On What Sounded Right.
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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.
Marine
Sea
Unseen
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.
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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.
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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.
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There Was A Level On Which I Believed That What Had Happened Remained Reversible
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A Pool Is, For Many Of Us In The West, A Symbol Not Of Affluence But Of Order, Of Control Over The Uncontrollable. A Pool Is Water, Made Available And Useful, And Is, As Such, Infinitely Soothing To The Western Eye.
Eye
Order
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Aging And Its Evidence Remain Lifes Most Predictable Events, Yet They Also Remain Matters We Prefer To Leave Unmentioned, Unexplored.
Events
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Once In A While There Were Things In Screenwriting That Taught Me Things For Fiction. But There's Nothing In Screenwriting That Teaches You Anything For The Theater. I'm Not Sure I've Ever Fully Appreciated Before How Different A Form Theater Is.
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Appreciated
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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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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.
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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.
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We All Have The Same Dreams.
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Locked Doors
Lost
Stills
I Don't Know What I Think Until I Write It Down.
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I Am A Writer. Imagining What Someone Would Say Or Do Comes To Me As Naturally As Breathing.
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Burroughs's Voice Is Hard, Derisive, Inventive, Free, Funny, Serious, Poetic, Indelibly American.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Dawned Temperate And Nearly Cloudless In The Eastern United States.
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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.
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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.
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Grief Turns Out To Be A Place None Of Us Know Until We Reach It.
Grief
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When I Began Writing These Pages I Believed Their Subject To Be Children, The Ones We Have And The Ones We Wish We Had, The Ways In Which We Depend On Our Children To Depend On Us, The Ways In Which We Encourage Them To Remain Children, The Ways In Which They Remain More Unknown To Us Than They Do To Their More Casual Acquaintances; The Ways In Which We Remain Equally Opaque To Them.
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It Occurs To Me That We Allow Ourselves To Imagine Only Such Messages As We Need To Survive.
Generosity
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Self-respect Is A Question Of Recognizing That Anything Worth Having Has A Price.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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People Tend To Forget That My Presence Runs Counter To Their Best Interests. And It Always Does. That Is One Last Thing To Remember. Writers Are Always Selling Somebody Out.
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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.
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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.
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If We Do Not Respect Ourselves, We Are On The One Hand Forced To Despise Those Who Have So Few Resources As To Consort With Us, So Little Perception As To Remain Blind To Our Fatal Weaknesses. On The Other, We Are Peculiarly In Thrall To Everyone We See, Curiously Determined To Live Out — Since Our Self-image Is Untenable — Their False Notions Of Us… We Play Roles Doomed To Failure Before They Are Begun, Each Defeat Generating Fresh Despair At The Urgency Of Divining And Meeting The Next Demand Made Upon Us.
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Hand That On Parting Squeezes Your Shoulder, Salutes The Small Of Your Back.
Hands
Shoulders
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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.
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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.
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Done
Should
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Way
Wanted
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.
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Eye
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Thin Air
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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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Deranged
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Night
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When The Ground Starts Moving, All Bets Are Off.
Moving
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.
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Real
Winning
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.
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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
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Writing
Order
Stories
A Single Person Is Missing For You, And The Whole World Is Empty.
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Some Of Us Who Live In Arid Parts Of The World Think About Water With A Reverence Others Might Find Excessive.
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Water
World
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.
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Thinking
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.
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Mean
Cities
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.
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Art
Light
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.
Angel
Mind
Analysis
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.
Talking
People
Twelve
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.
Notebook
Daughter
Lonely
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.
Dog
Men
Vanity
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.
Powerful
Book
Reading
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.
Dream
Listening
Want
In The Absence Of A Natural Disaster We Are Left Again To Our Own Uneasy Devices.
Loss
Absence
Natural
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."
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Self
Psychosis
To Cure Jealousy Is To See It For What It Is, A Dissatisfaction With Self.
Jealousy
Self
Cures
Vegas Is The Most Extreme And Allegorical Of American Settlements, Bizarre And Beautiful In Its Venality And In Its Devotion To Immediate Gratification.
Beautiful
Vegas
Devotion
The Willingness To Accept Responsibility For One's Own Life Is The Source From Which Self-respect Springs.
Life
Respect
Self Esteem
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.
Inspirational
Loss
Bereavement
Writing Fiction Is For Me A Fraught Business, An Occasion Of Daily Dread For At Least The First Half Of The Novel, And Sometimes All The Way Through. The Work Process Is Totally Different From Writing Nonfiction. You Have To Sit Down Every Day And Make It Up.
Writing
Different
Fiction
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.
Simple
Thinking
Pieces
The Future Always Looks Good In The Golden Land, Because No One Remembers The Past.
Past
Land
Looks
Water Is Important To People Who Do Not Have It, And The Same Is True Of Control.
People
Water
Important
It Is Easy To See The Beginnings Of Things, And Harder To See The Ends.
Easy
Ends
Harder
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.
Writing
Thinking
Want
I Closed The Box And Put It In A Closet. There Is No Real Way To Deal With Everything We Lose.
Real
Way
Boxes
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
Answers
Novel
I Never Had Much Interest In Being A Child. As A Way Of Being It Seemed Flat, Failed To Engage.
Children
Way
Interest
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 Maybe—if I Go Ahead And Finish It Anyway—i Can Get It Right Next Time. Maybe I Can Have Another Chance.
Hate
Book
Color
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.
Thinking
People
Mind
I'm Totally In Control Of This Tiny, Tiny World Right There At The Typewriter.
Typewriters
World
Tiny
What You're Normally Doing As A Writer Is Trying To Find The Narrative.
Trying
Narrative
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.
Eye
Sparrows
Feels
Of Course, You Always Think About How It Will Be Read. I Always Aim For A Reading In One Sitting.
Reading
Thinking
Sitting
Grammar Is A Piano I Play By Ear.
Play
Piano
Ears
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.
Feels
Somehow Writing Has Always Seemed To Me To Have An Element Of Performance.
Writing
Elements
Performances
Information Is Control.
Information
Do Not Whine... Do Not Complain. Work Harder. Spend More Time Alone.
Complaining
More Time
Work Harder
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.
Writing
Mean
Thinking
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.
Twenties
Needs
Fifty
Most Death Now Happens In Hospitals. It's Been Medicalized. It Happens Away From Where We Deal With It Directly. And That's A Huge Change. At The Beginning Of The 20th Century Most People Died At Home. Death Was Much More Common.
Home
People
Common
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.
Wind
Weather
People
I Can't Imagine Writing If I Didn't Have A Reader. Any More Than An Actor Can Imagine Acting Without An Audience.
Writing
Acting
Actors
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.
Night
August
President
To Believe In'the Greater Good' Isto Operate, Necessarily, In A Certain Ethical Suspension.
Believe
Ethical
Certain
It's Just A Deep Pleasure To Read Something You've Written Yourself - If And When You Like It.
Ifs And
You Like It
Pleasure
There's A Lot Of Landscape I Never Would Have Described If I Hadn't Been Homesick. The Impulse Was Nostalgia.
Landscape
Homesick
Nostalgia
My Own Fantasies Of What Life Would Be Like At 24 Tended To The More Spectacular.
Would Be
Fantasy
Spectacular
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.
Adoption
Problem
Abandoned
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.
Want
Facts
Fractions
The Ability To Think For One's Self Depends Upon One's Mastery Of The Language.
Thinking
Self
Mastery
To Free Us From The Expectations Of Others, To Give Us Back To Ourselves - There Lies The Great, Singular Power Of Self-respect.
Respect
Lying
Self
My Only Advantage As A Reporter Is That I Am So Physically Small, So Temperamentally Unobtrusive, And So Neurotically Inarticulate That People Tend To Forget That My Presence Runs Counter To Their Best Interests.
Running
People
Forget
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.
Mean
Thinking
Practice
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.
Spring
Responsibility
Character
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.
Mistake
Procrastination
Years
For However Dutifully We Record What We See Around Us, The Common Denominator Of All We See Is Always, Transparently, Shamelessly, The Implacable I.
Records
Common
Common Denominator
I Don't Write For Catharsis; I Have To Write To Understand.
Writing
Catharsis
I Hadn't Thought That I Was Generally A Pack Rat, But It Turns Out I Am.
Rats
Turns
Packs
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."
Writing
People
Mind
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.
Suicide
Multiple Choice
Choices
Let Me Just Be In The Ground. Let Me Just Be In The Ground And Go To Sleep.
Sleep
Going To Sleep
Let Me
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.
America
Secret
Desire
I Was No Longer, If I Had Ever Been, Afraid To Die: I Was Now Afraid Not To Die.
Dies
Ifs
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
Thinking
Blue
If You Aren't Aware Of The Reader, You're Working In A Vacuum.
Vacuums
Reader
Ifs
When You Write, You're Always Revealing A Difficult Part Of Yourself. It May Not Be A Part Of Yourself That Looks As Difficult - There Are Parts That Look More Difficult - But In Fact, They Are All Difficult, And You Get Kind Of Used To Doing That. It Is Sort Of The Nature Of The Thing.
Writing
Looks
May
One Thing In My Defense, Not That It Matters: I Know Something Carter Never Knew, Or Helene, Or Maybe You. I Know What "nothing" Means, And Keep On Playing.
Mean
Defense
Matter
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.
Dream
New York
Thinking
We All Survive More Than We Think We Can.
Thinking
Short Stories Demand A Certain Awareness Of One's Own Intentions, A Certain Narrowing Of The Focus.
Writing
Focus
Stories
I Have Already Lost Touch With A Couple Of People I Used To Be
Couple
People
Used
You Have To Make Sure You Have The Characters You Want. That's Really The Most Complicated Part.
Character
Want
Complicated
Marriage Is Memory, Marriage Is Time.
Memories
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.
Needs
Done
Afternoon
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.
Commitment
Motherhood
Way
In The Early Years, You Fight Because You Don't Understand Each Other. In The Later Years, You Fight Because You Do.
Funny
Marriage
Witty
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.
Memories
Ocean
Cutting
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.
World
Stage
Stuck
When I Am Near The End Of A Book, I Have To Sleep In The Same Room With It.
Book
Sleep
Rooms
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.
Blessed
Writing
Mean
I Mean Maybe I Was Holding All The Aces, But What Was The Game?
Mean
Games
Aces
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?
Time
Memories
Night
Read, Learn, Work It Up, Go To The Literature. Information Is Control.
Literature
Information
Working It
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.
New York
Somewhere Else
Cities
California Is A Place In Which A Boom Mentality And A Sense Of Chekhovian Loss Meet In Uneasy Suspension.
Loss
California
Uneasy
What Makes Iago Evil? Some People Ask. I Never Ask.
People
Evil
Lays
Time Is The School In Which We Learn.
New Year
School
Time Management
There's A General Impulse To Distract The Grieving Person - As If You Could.
Grieving
Impulse
Persons
You Have To Pick The Places You Don't Walk Away From.
Commitment
Powerful Women
Walks
Innocence Ends When One Is Stripped Of The Delusion That One Likes Oneself.
Likes
Innocence
Ends
The Past Could Be Jettisoned . . . But Seeds Got Carried.
Past
Genealogy
Seeds
I Have Always Wanted A Swimming Pool And Never Had One.
Swimming
Pool
Swimming Pool
Details Are Our Business As Writers. Your Heart Leaps When You See A Detail That Can Go Somewhere
Heart
Details
Leap
You Aren't Sure If You're Making The Right Decision - About Anything, Ever.
Decision
Right Decision
Ifs
He Was An Outsider Who Lived By His Ability To Manipulate The Inside.
Outsiders
Ability
Manipulate
I Have Not Been The Witness I Wanted To Be.
Witness
Wanted
I Don't Lead A Writer's Life. And I Think That Can Be A Source Of Suspicion And Irritation To Some People.
Thinking
Irritation
People
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.
Choices
Able
Facts
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.
Sitting
Shapes
Want
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.
Order
Trying
Alive
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.
Wall
Night
Blue
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.
Different
Done
Want
Life Changes In The Instant. The Ordinary Instant.
Life Changing
Ordinary
Existentialism
Grammar Is A Piano I Play By Ear. All I Know About Grammar Is Its Power.
Music
Power
English Grammar
We Are Well Advised To Keep On Nodding Terms With The People We Used To Be, Whether We Find Them Attractive Company Or Not.
People
Nodding
Attractive
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.
Children
Crazy
Reading
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.
Writing
Filling In
Process
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.
Death
Sight
Lines
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.
Memories
Past
People
Mourning Has Its Place But Also Its Limits.
Mourning
Limits
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.
Running
Lying
Home
Lancaster, California ... That Promised Land Sometimes Called 'the West Coast Of Iowa.
Iowa
Land
California
There Must Be Times When Everybody Writes When They Feel They're Evading Writing.
Writing
Feels
What I Want To Tell You Today Is Not To Move Into That World Where You're Alone With Yourself And Your Mantra And Your Fitness Program Or Whatever It Is That You Might Use To Try To Control The World By Closing It Out. I Want To Tell You Just To Live In The Mess. Throw Yourself Out Into The Convulsions Of The World. I'm Not Telling You To Make The World Better, Because I Don't Believe Progress Is Necessarily Part Of The Package. I'm Telling You To Live In It. Try And Get It. Take Chances, Make Your Own Work, Take Pride In It. Seize The Moment.
Life
Moving
Believe
Life Changes Fast. Life Changes In The Instant. You Sit Down To Dinner And Life As You Know It Ends.
Life
Dinner
Ends
It's Hard To Find A Book That's Safe To Write. Because One Always Goes To Dark Or Difficult Places.
Book
Writing
Dark
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.
Kind
Hysterical
Temper
I Know What "nothing" Means, And Keep On Playing.
Mean
Knows
The Writer Is Always Tricking The Reader Into Listening To Their Dream.
Dream
Listening
Reader
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.
Facts
Appreciated
Moments
...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.
New York
Spring
Twilight
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.
Pain
Eye
Scary
Writers Are Always Selling Somebody Out.
Writing
Journalism
Selling
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.
Doctors
Light
Perfectly Normal
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.
Writing
Afterlife
White
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.
Understanding
Tea
Hot
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.
Rain
Dark
Clouds
The Apparent Ease Of California Life Is An Illusion, And Those Who Believe The Illusion Will Live Here In Only The Most Temporary Way.
Believe
California
Ease
I Do Have A Strong Sense Of An Order In The Universe.
Strong
Order
Order In The Universe
Any Compulsion Tries To Justify Itself.
Trying
Inexplicable
Compulsion
I Think Nobody Owns The Land Until Their Dead Are In It.
Thinking
Land
Ownership
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.
Suicide
Order
Multiple Choice
I Lead A Very Conventional Life.
Conventional
Conventional Life
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