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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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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Things
Anxious
Notebooks
Lonely
Resistant
Private
Afflicted
Birth
Keepers
Loss
Breed
Children
Notebook
Malcontents
Different
Altogether
Presentiment
Writing
Apparently
Malcontent

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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.
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[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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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.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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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.
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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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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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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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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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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.
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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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