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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: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Dreaming
Dream
Thought
Find
Writing

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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
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I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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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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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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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.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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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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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.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.
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Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
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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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