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When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Gets
Working
Back
Book
Page
Every
Sentences
Rhythm
Constantly
Pages

More quotes by Joan Didion

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In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
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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 lead a very conventional life.
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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.
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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.
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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
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Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.
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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
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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 could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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