Quote

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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Change
Writing
Mind
Way
Imposing
People
Oneself
Listen
Saying
Upon

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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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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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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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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.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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Information is control.
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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
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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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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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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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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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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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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
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