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The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Way
Suppose
Accidentally
Things
Begins
Inexplicable
Begin
Cradle
Share
Compulsion
Write
Tries
Doe
Justify
Secondarily
Writing
Impulse
Peculiarly
Trying
Useful
Compulsive

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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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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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What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
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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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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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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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I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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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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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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I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
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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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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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