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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
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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Definitely
Alters
Structure
Photographed
Meaning
Shift
Objects
Sentence
Position
Sentences
Writing
Camera
Cameras
Object
More quotes by Joan Didion
I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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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.
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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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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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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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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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.
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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
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New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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