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Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Exactly
Interesting
Tenuous
Read
Craziness
Nothing
Sanity
Really
Express
Seemed
Grief
Aspect

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Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
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Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
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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 know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
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New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
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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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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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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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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.
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I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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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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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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