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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
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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Bring
Point
Process
Back
Writing
Rewriting
Going
Filling
Discover
Changing
More quotes by Joan Didion
If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
Joan Didion
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
Joan Didion
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
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
I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
Joan Didion
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
Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
Joan Didion
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Joan Didion
I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
Joan Didion
What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
Joan Didion
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
Joan Didion
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
Joan Didion
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Joan Didion
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
Joan Didion
