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Writers are always selling somebody out.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Writers
Somebody
Writing
Always
Journalism
Selling

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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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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
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My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
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Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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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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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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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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
Joan Didion
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
Joan Didion
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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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Anything worth having has its price.
Joan Didion