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I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Parent
Feels
Good
Think
Thinking
Like
Anybody
People
Parents
Ought

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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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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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we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
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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.
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Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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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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