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I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Would
Imagining
Naturally
Breathing
Writer
Comes
Someone

More quotes by Joan Didion

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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
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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 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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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
Joan Didion
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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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.
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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.
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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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 have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
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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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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
Joan Didion
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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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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
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I lead a very conventional life.
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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
Joan Didion