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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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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Imagine
Audience
Acting
Actors
Didn
Without
Writing
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Actor

More quotes by Joan Didion

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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
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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.
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I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
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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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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
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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.
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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.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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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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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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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.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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Anything worth having has its price.
Joan Didion
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I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
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I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
Joan Didion
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
Joan Didion
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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
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
Joan Didion