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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
Wind
Local
Realizing
Edge
Imagination
Edges
Shows
Weather
Hard
Figures
Radically
People
Lived
Santa
Close
Angeles
Realize
Locals

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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
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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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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
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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.
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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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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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