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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Record
However
Records
Common
Dutifully
Around
Transparently
Always
Shamelessly
Implacable
Denominator

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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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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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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
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Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
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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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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
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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.
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I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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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.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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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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