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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
Thing
Next
Doesn
Asleep
Another
Near
Ends
Somehow
Book
Room
Need
Rooms
Right
Leave
Needs
Sleep

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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
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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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Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character X. I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.
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Information is control.
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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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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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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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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 wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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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.
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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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 have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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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.
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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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Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
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