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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
Without
Writing
Reader
Actor
Imagine
Audience
Acting
Actors
Didn

More quotes by Joan Didion

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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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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 did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
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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 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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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
Joan Didion
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion