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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Ethics
Adults
Came
Life
Equipped
Ethic
Essentially
Adult
Romantic

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Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
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Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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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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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 ... 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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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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The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
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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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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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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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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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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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