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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

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Writer
Think
Thinking
Life
People
Irritation
Suspicion
Lead
Source

More quotes by Joan Didion

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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Joan Didion
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
Joan Didion
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
Joan Didion
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
Joan Didion
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
Joan Didion
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I lead a very conventional life.
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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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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Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
Joan Didion
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion
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I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.
Joan Didion
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Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.
Joan Didion
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
Joan Didion
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
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My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
Joan Didion
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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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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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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