Quote

I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Beyond
Scripts
Arrangement
Rooms
Pictures
Sequence
Longer
Supposed
Arrangements
Hear
Meant
Flash
Knew
Saws
Temporary
Mislaid
Movie
Meaning
Plot
Cues
Experience
Cutting
Script
Variable
Room
Images
Variables

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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 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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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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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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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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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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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Joan Didion
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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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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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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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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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.
Joan Didion
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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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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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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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
Joan Didion