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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
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Marriage
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Experience
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More quotes by Joan Didion
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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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.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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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 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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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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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
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I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
Joan Didion
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
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We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.
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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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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
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I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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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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