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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Ability
Outsider
Manipulate
Outsiders
Lived
Inside

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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
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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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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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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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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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[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
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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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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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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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Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.
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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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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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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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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
Joan Didion