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any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Inexplicable
Compulsion
Tries
Justify
Trying

More quotes by Joan Didion

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Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
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Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
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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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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
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I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
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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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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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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
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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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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
Joan Didion
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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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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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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.
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On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
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