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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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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
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Sacramento
California
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More quotes by Joan Didion
What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
Joan Didion
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
Joan Didion
I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
Joan Didion
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
Joan Didion
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Joan Didion
I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
Joan Didion
Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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.
Joan Didion
To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
Joan Didion
It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
Joan Didion
California: The west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
Joan Didion
We are the stories we tell ourselves
Joan Didion
It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
Joan Didion
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
Joan Didion
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
Joan Didion
Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
Joan Didion
Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
Joan Didion
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
Joan Didion
There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
Joan Didion
Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.
Joan Didion
