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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Thought
Pack
Packs
Rats
Hadn
Generally
Turns

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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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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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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
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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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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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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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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 are the stories we tell ourselves
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Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
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I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
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Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
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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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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
Joan Didion
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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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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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