Quote

There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Point
Leaving
Undamaged
Actually
Piece
Stroke
Another
Room
Strokes
Cannot
Pieces
Suffered
Writing
Rooms
Apparently
Always
Imagine
Literally
Small
Starts
Word
False

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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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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 am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
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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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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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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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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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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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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.
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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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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
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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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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 have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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