Quote

I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Much
Possible
Think
Gone
Thinking
Idea
Death
Controlled
Part
Gave
Ideas
Loss
Come
Crazy
Mean
Control

More quotes by Joan Didion

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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
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Information is control.
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On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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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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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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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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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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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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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
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When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
Joan Didion
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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Anything worth having has its price.
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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
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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.
Joan Didion
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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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.
Joan Didion