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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
Evidence
Notwithstanding
Happened
Mixed
Three
Blessings
Ever
Twenty
Nothing
Twenties
Even
Conviction
Like
Contrary
Blessing

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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
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Information is control.
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Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
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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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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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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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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.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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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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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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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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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.
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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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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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