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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Homesickness
Impulse
Home
Back
Writing
Trying
Much
Invoking

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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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I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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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.
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I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.
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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.
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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary 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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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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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.
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Information is control.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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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'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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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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