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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

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Information is control.
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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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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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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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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
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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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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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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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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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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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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.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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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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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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