You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.
— Joan Didion
To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.
In many ways, 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.' It's an aggressive, even a hostile act.
You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.
When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal.
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.
The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.
I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man's soul.
I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me.
All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.
I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this plane and went to San Francisco, and the minute that plane lifted above the clouds, I felt this incredible sense of lightness.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.
I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.
The truth is, it's easier for me to write than talk... to express the state I'm in at any time.
To make an omelette, you need not only those broken eggs but someone 'oppressed' to beat them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make 51 percent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class.
It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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.
When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends.
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.
The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black.
A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions - leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways - those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California.
I can remember, when I was in college, irritating deeply somebody I was going out with, because he would ask me what I was thinking and I would say I was thinking nothing. And it was true.
There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.
I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn't lead a writer's life at all.
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.
Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.
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.
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.
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.
To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.
The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.
I never think people are too careful with me.
My mother 'gave teas' the way other mothers breathed. Her own mother 'gave teas.' All of their friends 'gave teas,' each involving butter cookies extruded from a metal press and pastel bonbons ordered from See's.
We all survive more than we think we can.
A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.
I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.
I couldn't give away my husband's shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes - I don't know what it was about the shoes, but a lot of people have mentioned to me that shoes took on more meaning than we generally think they do... their attachment to the ground, I don't know - but that did have a real resonance for me.
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.
I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. 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.
I am always writing to myself.
I was raised an Episcopalian. And I did not and I don't believe that anyone is looking out for me personally.
