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Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
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Sacramento
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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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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.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
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I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
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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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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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I lead a very conventional life.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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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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On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
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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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When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
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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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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 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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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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