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We are the stories we tell ourselves

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Tell
Stories

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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.
Joan Didion
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Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
Joan Didion
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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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Writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
Joan Didion
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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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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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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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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Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
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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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
Joan Didion
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I lead a very conventional life.
Joan Didion
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
Joan Didion
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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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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.
Joan Didion