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I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Learned
Unnoticed
Lines
Surveillance
Death
Brush
Away
Brushes
Keep
Ground
Might
Sight
Early
Coil
Line
Cleared

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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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The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
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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.
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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.
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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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.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
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I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
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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.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
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Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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