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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
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Hard
Places
Writing
Safe
Always
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Dark
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More quotes by Joan Didion

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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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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.
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On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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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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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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I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
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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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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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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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When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
Joan Didion
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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.
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My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
Joan Didion
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Joan Didion
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
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