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If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Writing
Work
Kind
Way
Thinking
Understand
Write

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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
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On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
Joan Didion
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
Joan Didion
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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
Joan Didion
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
Joan Didion
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
Joan Didion
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
Joan Didion
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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Anything worth having has its price.
Joan Didion
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
Joan Didion
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
Joan Didion