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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Character
Ethics
Self
Spring
Life
Accept
Accepting
Source
Respect
Responsibility
Springs
Belief
Willingness

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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
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I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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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.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
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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.
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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
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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.
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What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
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