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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
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Think
Show
Stable
Thinking
Moment
Suddenly
Doesn
Across
Moments
Seem
Shows
Talent
Seems
Imagine
Matter
Audience
Writing
Getting

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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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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 look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
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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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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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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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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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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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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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