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"There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
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Exlpore more Authorship quotes
"Authorship of anything apart from God is nothing more than a tragedy in the making."
"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."
"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."
"Authoring a book is the sound of your voice around the world."
"What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes."
"You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic."
"We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship."
"It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it."
"I have a handful of prayers that I pray all the time... One is that God will put my books into the right hands at the right times. I've prayed this prayer thousands of times, and God has answered it in dramatic fashion countless times. The right book in the right hands at the right time can save a marriage, avert a mistake, demand a decision, plant a seed, conceive a dream, solve a problem, and prompt a prayer. That is why I write. And that's why, for me, a book sold is not a book sold; a book sold is a prayer answered. I don't know the name and situation of every reader, but God does, and that's all that matters."
"I didn't really escape that gravity until I moved 300 miles south to go to college at 18, where authorship no longer seemed something liable to induce vengeful punishment."
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."
"Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is 'nothing."
"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."
"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."
"Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested - ask any doctor - that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known."
"A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age."
"The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers."
"Their suburbia house in Brentwood' was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need."
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