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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: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Without
Writing
Reader
Actor
Imagine
Audience
Acting
Actors
Didn

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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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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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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
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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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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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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 assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
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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.
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
Joan Didion
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If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.
Joan Didion
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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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