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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: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Nothing
Easily
Writing
Blue
Thing
Reach
Work
Coming
Way
Sort
Always
Understanding
Think
Force
Forces
Thinking
Comes
Otherwise

More quotes by Joan Didion

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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
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I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
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The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
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I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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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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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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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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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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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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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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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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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
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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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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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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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