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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Normally
Narrative
Writer
Find
Trying

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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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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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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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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
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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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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
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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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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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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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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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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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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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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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I lead a very conventional life.
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