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[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
Joan Didion
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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Ever
Twenty
Nothing
Twenties
Even
Conviction
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Contrary
Blessing
Evidence
Notwithstanding
Happened
Mixed
Three
Blessings
More quotes by Joan Didion
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Joan Didion
He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
Joan Didion
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
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
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
I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
Joan Didion
There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
Joan Didion
I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
Joan Didion
It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
Joan Didion
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
Joan Didion
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
Joan Didion
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
Joan Didion
California: The west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
