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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Think
Thinking
Adjusts
Conforms
Conform
Fades
Memory
Memories
Remember

More quotes by Joan Didion

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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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.
Joan Didion
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Information is control.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Joan Didion
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion
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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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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
Joan Didion
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
Joan Didion
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Joan Didion
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Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.
Joan Didion
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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control.
Joan Didion
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
Joan Didion
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I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
Joan Didion