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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
Inside
Ability
Outsider
Manipulate
Outsiders
Lived

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
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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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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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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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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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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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In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
Joan Didion
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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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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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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I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
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I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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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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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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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.
Joan Didion
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Joan Didion
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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
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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.
Joan Didion