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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
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Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
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Nonfiction
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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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Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
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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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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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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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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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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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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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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
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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 lead a very conventional life.
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What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
Joan Didion
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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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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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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