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Writers are always selling somebody out.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Writing
Always
Journalism
Selling
Writers
Somebody

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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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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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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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Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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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 well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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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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We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.
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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
Joan Didion