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

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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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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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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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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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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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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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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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[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.
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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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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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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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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
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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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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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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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