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
Writing
Mind
Way
Imposing
People
Oneself
Listen
Saying
Upon
Change

More quotes by Joan Didion

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What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
Joan Didion
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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
Joan Didion
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
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Information is control.
Joan Didion
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Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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We all survive more than we think we can.
Joan Didion
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Joan Didion
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
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Anything worth having has its price.
Joan Didion
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I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
Joan Didion
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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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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
Joan Didion
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Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
Joan Didion
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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion