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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Place
Suspension
Boom
Uneasy
Mentality
California
Meet
Loss
Sense

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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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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.
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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.
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I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
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What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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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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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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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.
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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.
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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
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I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
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I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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