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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Recognize
Lose
Loses
Become
Going
Kind
Unhinged
Things
Hysterical
Like
Temper

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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
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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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Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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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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I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
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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 hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
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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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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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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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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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