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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: 89
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 are the stories we tell ourselves
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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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.
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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.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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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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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.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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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.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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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.
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Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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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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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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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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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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