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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Control
Right
World
Typewriter
Typewriters
Tiny
Totally

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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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A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
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What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
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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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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
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Information is control.
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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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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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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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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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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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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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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
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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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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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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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