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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: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Feels
Writing
Evading
Writes
Everybody
Times
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Must
More quotes by Joan Didion
I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
Joan Didion
Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
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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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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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Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
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I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
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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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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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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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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
Joan Didion
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Joan Didion
I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
Joan Didion
