Joan Didion

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be

Writers are only rarely likable.

A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

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.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

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.

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.

I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.

Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.

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.

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.

I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.

I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.