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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
Illusion
Live
Believe
Way
Life
Apparent
Temporary
California
Ease

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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
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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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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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Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character X. I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.
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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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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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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
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