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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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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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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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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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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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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character X. I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.
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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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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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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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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
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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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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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