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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
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
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
Joan Didion
To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
We are the stories we tell ourselves
Joan Didion
Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
Joan Didion
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
Joan Didion
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
Joan Didion
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
Joan Didion
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
Joan Didion
I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
Joan Didion
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
Joan Didion
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
Joan Didion
