Joan Didion Quotes
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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.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.
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I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.
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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.
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Call me the author.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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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.
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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.
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I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.
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We all survive more than we think we can.