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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Evading
Writes
Everybody
Times
Feel
Must
Feels
Writing

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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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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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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.
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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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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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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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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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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
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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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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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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.
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