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Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Come
Novel
Novels
Think
Pieces
Whereas
Thinking
Started
Complexes
Like
Since
Complex
Almost
Sentences
Simple
Using
Music
Computer
Ever
Poetry

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we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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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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Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
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Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
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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 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
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Joan Didion
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
Joan Didion
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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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.
Joan Didion
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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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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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Joan Didion
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There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
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Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
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