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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: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Tiny
Totally
Control
Right
World
Typewriter
Typewriters

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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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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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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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I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
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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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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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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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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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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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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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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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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
Joan Didion
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
Joan Didion
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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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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
Joan Didion