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Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.
Joan Didion
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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Book
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Somehow
More quotes by 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
I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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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.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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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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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion
Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
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I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.
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I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
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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.
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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
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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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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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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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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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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.
Joan Didion