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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Suggested
Antidote
Crying
Bags
Cry
Paper
Head

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I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character X. I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
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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.
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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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I lead a very conventional life.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
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I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
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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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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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