"I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking."
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Quote collection
Joan Didion quotes (page 10 of 14)
262 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic."
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"Memories are what you no longer want to remember."
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"The last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up."
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"Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time."
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"We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were."
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"When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color."
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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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"I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose."
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"There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible"
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"I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?"
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"Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful."
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"I have not been the witness I wanted to be."
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"I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die."
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"I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing."
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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 writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream."
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"Information is control."
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"I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction."
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"I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one."
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