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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
Stories
Tell

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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.
Joan Didion
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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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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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
Joan Didion
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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
Joan Didion
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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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I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Joan Didion
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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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In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
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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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.
Joan Didion
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
Joan Didion
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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
Joan Didion
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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
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