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California: The west coast of Iowa.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Iowa
Coast
California
West

More quotes by 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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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
Joan Didion
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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
Joan Didion
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I lead a very conventional life.
Joan Didion
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
Joan Didion
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
Joan Didion
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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.
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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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
Joan Didion
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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
Joan Didion
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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.
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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Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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Information is control.
Joan Didion
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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.
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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Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
Joan Didion