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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: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
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Writer
Sacramento
California
Seems
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Getting
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character X. I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.
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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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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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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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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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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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Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
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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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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
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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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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
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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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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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