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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Well
Terms
People
Company
Term
Amends
Whether
Bethlehem
Keep
Nodding
Used
Advised
Find
Deserted
Wells
Attractive

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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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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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I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
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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.
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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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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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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
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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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We all survive more than we think we can.
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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 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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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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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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Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
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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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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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