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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
Thinking
Comes
Otherwise
Nothing
Easily
Writing
Blue
Thing
Reach
Work
Coming
Way
Sort
Always
Understanding
Think
Force
Forces

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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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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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When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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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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Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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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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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
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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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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
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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.
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I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
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