"Like many writers I have only this one 'subject,' this one 'area': the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am 'interested,' for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word 'intellectual' I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts." -- Joan Didion