Joan Didion Quotes
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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
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The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.
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When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends.
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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.
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Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.
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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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In Brentwood we had a big safe-deposit box to put manuscripts in if we left town during fire season. It was such a big box that we never bothered to clean it out.
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Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
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The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.
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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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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
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I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
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Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
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The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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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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I am always writing to myself.
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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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.
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You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.
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The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black.
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Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.