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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Moral
Start
Something
Imperative
Thinking
Madmen
Imperatives
Fashionable
Deceiving
Join

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You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.
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Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.
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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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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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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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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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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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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.
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Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
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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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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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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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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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Information is control.
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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
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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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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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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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