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any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
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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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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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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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.
Joan Didion
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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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When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
Joan Didion
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion
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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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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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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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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
Joan Didion
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we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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Anything worth having has its price.
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
Joan Didion