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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: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Especially
Lines
Disparate
Upon
Imposition
Live
Images
Narrative
Entirely
Writers
Line

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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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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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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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.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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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 willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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I lead a very conventional life.
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