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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Impulse
Landscape
Never
Would
Homesick
Nostalgia
Described
Hadn

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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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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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Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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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 wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
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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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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
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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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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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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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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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