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Joan Didion


American
December 5, 1934
Author
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Writers are always selling somebody out.


Joan Didion
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We all survive more than we think we can.


Joan Didion
Tags: Think More Than
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You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.


Joan Didion
Tags: You Line Focus
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I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.


Joan Didion
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.


Joan Didion
I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.
Joan Didion
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion
Tags: Life Which Own
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.


Joan Didion
Tags: You About Think
Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
Joan Didion
Tags: About Much See
I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
Tags: Time Strength You
It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.
Joan Didion
One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
Tags: Fear Out Want
Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.
Joan Didion
Tags: Up Always Than
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Joan Didion
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance.
Joan Didion
Tags: Time Want Then
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
Tags: Movies You People
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. 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.
Joan Didion
Tags: You Like More
Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.
Joan Didion
Tags: Time Good Power
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
Joan Didion
Tags: People Think Who