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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
Live
Images
Narrative
Entirely
Writers
Line
Especially
Lines
Disparate
Upon
Imposition

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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
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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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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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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?
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Anything worth having has its price.
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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.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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Information is control.
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To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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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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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 don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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