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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Children
Much
Flat
Way
Flats
Never
Engage
Failed
Seemed
Child
Interest

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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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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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We all survive more than we think we can.
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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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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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I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
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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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I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
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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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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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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
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I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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