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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
Always
Shamelessly
Implacable
Denominator
Record
However
Records
Common
Dutifully
Around
Transparently

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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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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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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.
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New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
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Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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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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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
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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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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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[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.
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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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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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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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