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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.
Joan Didion
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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Never
Felt
Better
Done
Right
Different
Work
Differently
Way
Terms
Always
Term
More quotes by Joan Didion
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
Joan Didion
Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
Joan Didion
I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
Joan Didion
[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
Joan Didion
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
Joan Didion
I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
Joan Didion
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
Joan Didion
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
Joan Didion
Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
Joan Didion
I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Joan Didion
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
Joan Didion
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
Joan Didion
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
Joan Didion
I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
Joan Didion
