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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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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Always
Life
Word
Lasts
Last
Right

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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?
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
Joan Didion
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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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Writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion
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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.
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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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
Joan Didion
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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
Joan Didion
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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
Joan Didion