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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: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Outsider
Manipulate
Outsiders
Lived
Inside
Ability

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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
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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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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
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Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
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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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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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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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