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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
Joan Didion
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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Known
Anything
Whole
Something
Literal
Always
Screen
World
Screens
Stuck
Stage
More quotes by Joan Didion
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
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.
Joan Didion
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Joan Didion
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Joan Didion
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
Joan Didion
I don't know what I think until I write it down.
Joan Didion
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Joan Didion
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
It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
Joan Didion
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
Joan Didion
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
There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
Joan Didion
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
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
Anything worth having has its price.
Joan Didion
we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
Joan Didion
I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control.
Joan Didion
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
Joan Didion