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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Realize
Locals
Wind
Local
Realizing
Edge
Imagination
Edges
Shows
Weather
Hard
Figures
Radically
People
Lived
Santa
Close
Angeles

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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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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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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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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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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
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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 didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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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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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
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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.
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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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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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