Joan Didion was born in 1934 in Sacramento California, and famously bounced back and forth between New York City and Los Angeles. She is known for her non-fiction collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, and for novels including Play It As It Lays and A Book of Common Prayer. She also wrote screenplays with her husband John Gregory Dunne, including The Panic in Needle Park, the 1976 version of A Star is Born, and Up Close & Personal, which was very loosely based on the life of Jessica Savitch. She won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Prix Medicis Essais for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir about her reaction to the sudden death of Dunne.
“All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer. By which I mean not a ‘good’ writer or a ‘bad’ writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. 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. ”
“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.”
“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.”
“The ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.”
“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.”
“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrustive, and so neurotically inarticulate that 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.”
“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”
“I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone.”
“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.”
“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 their dream.”