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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
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Trying
More quotes by Joan Didion
It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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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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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.
Joan Didion
[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
Joan Didion
It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
Joan Didion
If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
Joan Didion
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Joan Didion
Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character X. I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.
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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.
Joan Didion
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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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
Joan Didion
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
Joan Didion
California: The west coast of Iowa.
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.
Joan Didion
Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
Joan Didion
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
Joan Didion
I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
Joan Didion
I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
Joan Didion
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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