Quote

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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
People
Ability
Cross
Talking
Crosses
Speakers
Purpose
Dinner
Purposes
Bigs
Piece
Scenes
Around
Scene
Impressed
Different
Pieces
Twelve
Always
Movies
Table
Never
Written
Tables

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In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
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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.
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I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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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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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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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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Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.
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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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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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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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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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Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
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If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.
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