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Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Thing
Reach
Work
Coming
Way
Sort
Always
Understanding
Think
Force
Forces
Thinking
Comes
Otherwise
Nothing
Easily
Writing
Blue

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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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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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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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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
Joan Didion
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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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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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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
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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.
Joan Didion
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Joan Didion
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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
Joan Didion
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Joan Didion
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
Joan Didion
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I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion
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I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
Joan Didion