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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Tended
Fantasies
Spectacular
Fantasy
Would
Life
Like

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If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.
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When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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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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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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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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I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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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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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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The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
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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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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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