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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
President
Flew
Night
Bags
Stills
Seven
Havana
Still
Gold
Revolver
General
Pajamas
Took
August
Five
Exile
Friends
Cuba

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I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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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.
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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.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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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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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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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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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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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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I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
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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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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 never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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