Quotenik
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Joan Didion

(b. 1934– )

U.S. novelist, essayist, and memoirist

“Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

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source: “Why I Write,” New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1976.

category: ,

medium: Essay

via: Austin Kleon

“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 therein the texture of the thing.”

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source: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 476.

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medium: interview

notes: Originally published in Issue 176 of The Paris Review, 2006.

“Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of ‘waves.'”

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source: The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 27.

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medium: nonfiction

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