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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Thinking
Entirely
Looking
Fear
Means
Write
Find
Mean
Writing
Fearless

More quotes by Joan Didion

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Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
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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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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?
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I lead a very conventional life.
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
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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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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
Joan Didion
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
Joan Didion
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I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.
Joan Didion
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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.
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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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
Joan Didion