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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
Antidote
Crying
Bags
Cry
Paper
Head
Suggested

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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
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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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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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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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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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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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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
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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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