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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
Going
Flow
Time
Gone
Else
Two
Options
Firsts
Laid
Everything
Sentence
First
Sentences
Hard
Stuck

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A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
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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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I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
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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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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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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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I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
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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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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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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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We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.
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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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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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