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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: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Thinking
Like
Anybody
People
Parents
Ought
Parent
Feels
Good
Think

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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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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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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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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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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.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
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You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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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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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.
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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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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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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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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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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
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