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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: 89
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
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Specifically
Course
Strokes
Stills
Paintings
More quotes by Joan Didion
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion
You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
Joan Didion
I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
Joan Didion
I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
Joan Didion
Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character X. I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.
Joan Didion
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
Joan Didion
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
Joan Didion
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
Joan Didion
He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
Joan Didion
Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
Joan Didion
I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
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.
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
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
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
There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
