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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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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Still
Novels
Thing
Originals
Watercolors
Every
Original
Rewrite
Like
Painting
Stroke
Novel
Texture
Courses
Specifically
Course
Strokes
Stills
Paintings

More quotes by Joan Didion

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Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
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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.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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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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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 don't know what I think until I write it down.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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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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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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Information is control.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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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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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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