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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Things
Extremes
Consider
Commitment
Looked
Marriage
Commitments
Simply
Doomed
Experience
Motherhood
Way
Extreme

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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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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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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 can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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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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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 know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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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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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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