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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
Joan Didion
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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Way
Life
Apparent
Temporary
California
Ease
Illusion
Live
Believe
More quotes by Joan Didion
You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
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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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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 always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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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.
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion
I lead a very conventional life.
Joan Didion
We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
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You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.
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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 don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
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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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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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Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
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Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
Joan Didion
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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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.
Joan Didion
