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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: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
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Journalist
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Sacramento
California
Write
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Justify
Secondarily
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Impulse
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Cradle
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Compulsion

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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
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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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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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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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Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
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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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Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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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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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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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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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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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
Joan Didion
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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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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion