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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
Think
Show
Stable
Thinking
Moment
Suddenly
Doesn
Across
Moments
Seem
Shows
Talent
Seems
Imagine
Matter
Audience
Writing
Getting

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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
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I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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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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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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Information is control.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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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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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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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
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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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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
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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 are the stories we tell ourselves
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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