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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
Joan Didion
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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Empty
Missing
Single
Persons
Person
Whole
World
Grieving
More quotes by Joan Didion
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
Joan Didion
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
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
It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
Joan Didion
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
Joan Didion
My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
Joan Didion
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
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
We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Joan Didion
Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
Joan Didion
I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
Joan Didion
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
Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
Joan Didion
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
Joan Didion
