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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Air
Close
Wind
Stars
Edge
Shows
Edges
Weather
Snow
Clouds

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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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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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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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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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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
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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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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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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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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 never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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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.
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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.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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