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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
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Find
Writing
Dreaming
Dream
Thought

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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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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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I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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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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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.
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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.
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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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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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
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we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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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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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.
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