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We all survive more than we think we can.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Survive
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Joan Didion

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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Joan Didion
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Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.
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I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.
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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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
Joan Didion
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Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
Joan Didion
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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
Joan Didion
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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.
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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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
Joan Didion
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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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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
Joan Didion
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
Joan Didion
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
Joan Didion
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
Joan Didion
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
Joan Didion
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
Joan Didion