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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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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Make
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Daily
First
Totally
Sometimes
Novel
Different
Fiction
Fraught
Writing
Least
Nonfiction
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Half
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Every
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More quotes by Joan Didion

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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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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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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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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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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 are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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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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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
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New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
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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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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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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
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Information is control.
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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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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.
Joan Didion