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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
Joan Didion -
When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
Joan Didion
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I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
Joan Didion -
You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.
Joan Didion -
Call me the author.
Joan Didion -
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Joan Didion -
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 -
We all survive more than we think we can.
Joan Didion
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I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.
Joan Didion -
I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.
Joan Didion -
A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions - leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways - those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California.
Joan Didion