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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: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
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Journalist
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Sacramento
California
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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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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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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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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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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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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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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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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.
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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.
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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
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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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