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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: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Term
Amends
Whether
Bethlehem
Keep
Nodding
Used
Advised
Find
Deserted
Wells
Attractive
Well
Terms
People
Company

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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.
Joan Didion
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
Joan Didion
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Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
Joan Didion
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I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Joan Didion
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we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
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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California: The west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
Joan Didion
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion
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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
Joan Didion
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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
Joan Didion
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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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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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New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
Joan Didion
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Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
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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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
Joan Didion