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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: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
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More quotes by Joan Didion
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.
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
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
Joan Didion
You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
Joan Didion
There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
Joan Didion
You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.
Joan Didion
I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
Joan Didion
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
Joan Didion
There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
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
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
Joan Didion
I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
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
Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
Joan Didion
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
Information is control.
Joan Didion
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Joan Didion
