Joan Didion

[on the death of her adopted daughter] I didn't take seriously how troubled she was. She was troubled from very early, certainly from the time she was five or six. If you come home and your child tells you that she's called a mental institution--that should have triggered something other than amusement on my part. Show less «

[on writing] 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. Show less «

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. Show less «

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something . . . but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen. Show less «