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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: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Much
Invoking
Homesickness
Impulse
Home
Back
Writing
Trying

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A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
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If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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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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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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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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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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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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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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Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
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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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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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