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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
Writer
Comes
Someone
Would
Imagining
Naturally
Breathing

More quotes by Joan Didion

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Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
Joan Didion
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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.
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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There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
Joan Didion
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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 came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
Joan Didion
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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
Joan Didion
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion
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Information is control.
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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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
Joan Didion
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
Joan Didion
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I lead a very conventional life.
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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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
Joan Didion
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
Joan Didion
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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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Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
Joan Didion