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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: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Done
Right
Different
Work
Differently
Way
Terms
Always
Term
Never
Felt
Better

More quotes by Joan Didion

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Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character X. I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
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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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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
Joan Didion
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
Joan Didion
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion
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You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.
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Anything worth having has its price.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
Joan Didion
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Joan Didion
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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
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
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I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
Joan Didion
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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
Joan Didion
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
Joan Didion
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
Joan Didion