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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: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Find
Book
Hard
Places
Writing
Safe
Always
Goes
Dark
Difficult
Write

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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 was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
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Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
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When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
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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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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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 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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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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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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To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
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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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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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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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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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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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