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Authors:
Joan Didion Quotes

Joan Didion quotes about work

American Author December 5, 1934

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Quotes

I hear a new tone when acquaintances ask how I am, a tone I have not before noticed and find increasing distressing, even humiliating: these acquaintances seem as they ask impatient, half concerned, half querulous, as if no longer interested in the answer. As if all too aware that the answer will be a complaint. I determine to speak, if asked how I am, only positively. I frame the cheerful response. What I believe to be the cheerful response as I frame it emerges, as I hear it, more in the... Joan Didion
Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignation with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards- the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been... Joan Didion
We closed the deal and moved to New York. Where in fact I had lived before, from the time I was twenty-one and just out of the English Department at Berkeley and starting work at Vogue (a segue so profoundly unnatural that when I was asked by the Cond Nast personnel department to name the languages in which I was fluent I could think only of Middle English) until I was twenty-nine and just married. Joan Didion
Joan Didion quote: "Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time..."
Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone. Joan Didion
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up. Joan Didion
Joan Didion quote: "Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is..."
Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control. Joan Didion
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. 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
New people could be seen, by people like my grandfather, as indifferent to everything that had made California work, but the ambiguity was this: new people were also who were making California rich. Joan Didion

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