Before Id written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers – when youve got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other peoples ability to do that. – Joan Didion
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought? – Joan Didion
To have that sense of ones 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. – Joan Didion
Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled. – Joan Didion