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We are the stories we tell ourselves

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Tell
Stories

More quotes by Joan Didion

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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion
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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
Joan Didion
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I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
Joan Didion
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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
Joan Didion
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I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
Joan Didion
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
Joan Didion
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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I lead a very conventional life.
Joan Didion
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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Joan Didion
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion
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What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
Joan Didion
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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.
Joan Didion
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[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
Joan Didion
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I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
Joan Didion