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You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Moments
Seem
Shows
Talent
Seems
Imagine
Matter
Audience
Writing
Getting
Think
Show
Stable
Thinking
Moment
Suddenly
Doesn
Across

More quotes by Joan Didion

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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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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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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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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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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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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.
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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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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
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Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
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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.
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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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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What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
Joan Didion