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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

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Hard
Stuck
Going
Flow
Time
Gone
Else
Two
Options
Firsts
Laid
Everything
Sentence
First
Sentences

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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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Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
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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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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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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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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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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
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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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We all survive more than we think we can.
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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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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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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.
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Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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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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