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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Nonfiction
Directly
Fiction
Talk
Voice

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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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Information is control.
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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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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
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I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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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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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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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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I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
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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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