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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Writing
Questions
Thing
Answer
Never
Novel
Would
Needed
Answers
Known
Write
Tell
Writers

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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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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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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 never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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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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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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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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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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Information is control.
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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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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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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 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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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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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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