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Joan Didion Inspirational Quotes (134)

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Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
Joan Didion
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I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
Joan Didion
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
Joan Didion
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
Joan Didion
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To have that sense of one's 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
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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
Joan Didion
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I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
Joan Didion
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The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
Joan Didion
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
Joan Didion
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Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
Joan Didion
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
Joan Didion
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
Joan Didion
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
Joan Didion
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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
Joan Didion
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
Joan Didion
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New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
Joan Didion
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What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
Joan Didion
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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
Joan Didion
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I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
Joan Didion
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I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
Joan Didion
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
Joan Didion
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Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
Joan Didion
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Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
Joan Didion
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
Joan Didion
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