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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Especially
Lines
Disparate
Upon
Imposition
Live
Images
Narrative
Entirely
Writers
Line

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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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.
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I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
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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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I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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