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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
True
Important
People
Control
Water

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Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
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I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
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Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
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I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.
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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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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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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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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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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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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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I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
Joan Didion
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
Joan Didion
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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.
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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
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