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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Writing
Intentions
Intention
Demand
Awareness
Short
Focus
Stories
Certain
Narrowing

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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.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
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There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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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.
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I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
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I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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Information is control.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
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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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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.
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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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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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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.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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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.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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