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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
Writing
Evading
Writes
Everybody
Times
Feel
Must
Feels

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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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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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Information is control.
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Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.
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I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
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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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In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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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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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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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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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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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.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
Joan Didion