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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Witness
Wanted

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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control.
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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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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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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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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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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
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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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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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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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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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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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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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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