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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
Tries
Justify
Trying
Inexplicable
Compulsion

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Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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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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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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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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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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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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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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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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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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