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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: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Would
Needed
Answers
Known
Write
Tell
Writers
Writing
Questions
Thing
Answer
Never
Novel

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Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
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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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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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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
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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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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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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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I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
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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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Anything worth having has its price.
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If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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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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Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
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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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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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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
Joan Didion