Joan Didion

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

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.