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"Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel."
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"What makes people tick? Life can be a trap of ennui, but imagery may be a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power and exuberance of images generate an inexorable addiction that needs to be gratified without respite. Here and now! ['Give me more images']"

"Authors always carry a means for scribbling and an excuse for pausing, often inopportunely, to record those fleeting sparks of creative fancy that might otherwise vanish like a wisp in the wind if ignored. Writing is a jealous and needy lover."

"I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh."

"Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion -writing- only the wrong side of the carpet."

"As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall."

"Our creativity is a universe within this universe, certainly a much bigger one!"

"I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page."

"A good dose of fantasy is exercise for your sensibilities, it keeps your avatar strong."

"To most, being locked away in solitary with nothing but pen and paper would prove a hard punishment. What a strange creature who views this as heaven."

"As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravid asking to be cut or it will fall."
Explore more quotes by Joan Didion

"The child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult."

"He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them."

"Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is 'nothing."

"She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card."

"And except on a certain kind of winter evening-six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that-except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it."

"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."

"There is a common superstition that 'self-respect is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation."

"Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service."
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