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We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Imagine
Choices
Fact
Facts
Able
Things
Survive
Choice
Wouldn

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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
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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.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
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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.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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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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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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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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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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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.
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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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I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
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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.
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If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.
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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